a guest post by: Matilda Schieren

Do you remember the Apple “crush” ad?

In 2024, Apple released a clip promoting its thinnest iPads yet: depicting a pile of creative paraphernalia—a piano, paint cans, notebooks, vinyl records—being violently crushed by a massive hydraulic press.  

The backlash was instant and irate (Apple pulled the ad from YouTube.)

Even if you don’t remember Apple’s misstep, I’m sure you remember the Wall Street Journal article that registered an 8.5 on Marketing-LinkedIn’s Richter scale just a couple months ago: Companies Are Desperately Seeking ‘Storytellers.’

The rebranding of content, PR and social media teams’ work as “storytelling” is the corporate world’s latest stab at marketing efficiency. At best, it’s senior leadership ephemera that’s sure to go the way of branded magazines (RIP). 

At worst, it’s positioning content team leaders smack in the middle of that unstoppable hydraulic press. 

Recession indicator or title of the year?

A scan through current “storyteller” job descriptions confirms that the title is really a trench coat concealing at least three roles stacked on top of each other. The storyteller is lead narrator and editor-in-chief; social media strategist and demand generation expert; messaging architect and product launch magician (who else is going to pull all those demo handraisers out of a hat?)

Even before the rise of the “storyteller” roles, announcements started seeping out about companies consolidating their earned and owned media teams. And no one gets slapped on the wrist for suggesting that your content, PR and social practitioners collaborate more.  

But this isn’t simply a story about collaboration.

It’s also the outcome of organizations (tech brands in particular) needing to minimize operating expenses. It’s the pendulum swinging back from “We need marketing specialists” to “We need generalists” (because no one truly knows what AI can or can’t achieve yet, so they need humans at the ready to pick up whatever slack remains.)

And it’s the start of content teams—those focusing on long-form, primarily written work—losing their biggest advocates. 

I recently left a content team I had the privilege of working with for almost five years. When our Director of Content gave notice, leadership decided not to backfill the role. The six of us would be absorbed by the communications team, a structural change intended to move us closer to colleagues we already partnered with.

In practice, it stripped us of whatever leverage we once had to say no to unnecessary content requests. It led to more departments treating us like a service function rather than a mature team, one whose work has a measurable influence on revenue. Consolidation can’t fill cracks within a marketing leadership team who can’t even agree on which team “owns” the corporate blog.

The storyteller renaissance seems like a return to thoughtful, people-centered content against the backdrop of bottomless AI slop. I think it’s a Trojan horse that could open the floodgates to more random acts of content.  

There’s already no shortage of stories. What’s missing is strategy.

Over the past 12 years, I’ve seen almost all content teams make the same fatal mistake: We don’t gatekeep enough.

Because everyone fancies themselves a writer, most folks believe they have the credentials to exert influence over what brands publish. Rescoping content to “storytelling” lets this misconception live to see another day. 

Everyone has a story: Your customer who just signed on after dumping a competitor, your IT director who led the launch of a new data center, your CEO who dreamt up the original business plan after a chance encounter over happy hour. 

But not everyone has the ability to parse out the valuable stories from the fluff. Not everyone can look at a heap of survey data and find the narrative that makes sense right now, for your audience and your messaging. Not everyone can get on a Zoom call with your president and clock an off the cuff comment that has the potential to become a gated asset. 

Quickly, the job of “telling stories” becomes the slog of taking orders. Colleagues from across the company namedrop “story” into their intake forms (in the same way everything has become “thought leadership”) to emphasize why their request must be prioritized. 

Brands have always and will continue to tell stories. That’s what exceptional writers, social strategists, PR managers and podcast producers do. But rather than play org chart origami, businesses need to give their content team leaders¹ (directors, heads, vice presidents if you’re lucky) the space² to cook.  

I suspect that a lot of organizations already have the right people in place to tell convincing, entertaining, informative stories. It’s the processes and politics around them that’s keeping the best stories locked away in Google Docs and Figma boards. 

Content leaders won’t untangle these webs overnight, or even in a quarter. But there are ways to advocate for your existing team and redirect your leaders’ attention away from the shiny new job description discourse and to the storytelling that is already happening:

1. Audit your team’s work. Not in a what’s performing vs. what’s not way, but rather, which teams do you support regularly? How often are you concepting, writing or editing assets that fuel other departments’ goals? Measure the full scope of what your team touches and share that with higher-ups frequently. This can do one of two things: Spark conversations about work that your team can finally deprioritize, or headcount that should probably sit under you rather than elsewhere in the organization.
   
   
2. Merchandise your audience intuition. In my experience, content people are exceptionally fluent in the voice of your customer. They’re interviewing them for articles, playing back their Gong calls, lurking in community Slacks and Discords to understand what’s really stressing them out. They’re absorbing specific details that go so far beyond a composite persona slide. Document this knowledge base and point to it when requests come in for stories that you know deep down won’t land.
   
   
3. Go beyond voice and tone guidelines. At this point, companies need more than wikis explaining where they stand on the Oxford comma. But if certain grammatical boxes must be checked before something publishes, story ideas should have to pass through a thoughtful quality detector before taking up a writer’s week. Define the rubric for what “good” looks like (e.g., no competitor copycat ideas, must have a clear customer example to back it up).  

Fancy job descriptions won’t fix what’s broken about corporate storytelling. Thoughtful content leaders might. ■

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Matilda Schieren is a freelance editorial leader and writer with over a decade of experience helping B2B brands create content that matters. She lives in the Chicago area with her husband, two children and a 50-pound German Shorthaired Pointer. You can follow her writing on Substack.

1. By “content leaders,” I mean the people who still manage writers. Because (as Jimmy Daly expressed so eloquently), long-form written content still matters. It’s still the load-bearing wall that props up so many parts of a company’s marketing efforts. ↩︎
2. And by “space” I mean budget, clear ownership of specific content mediums and the authority to enforce the strategy you paid them to develop.  ↩︎