In “Companies Are Desperately Seeking ‘Storytellers’,” Katie Deighton reports for The Wall Street Journal that brands across industries are increasingly recruiting “storytellers” — a role once reserved for, say, novelists and filmmakers—to shape company narratives and drive engagement through posts, podcasts, videos and blah, blah, blah.

This trend reflects how traditional media’s influence has declined while companies now own their publishing channels and need authentic voices to cut through a flood of generic content, especially in a landscape crowded by AI-generated material.

Yay for humans. What differentiates this new wave of storytelling from the previous aughts-era manifestation is its relative transparency and emphasis on authenticity. And yet, I still bristle a bit at the term, which—I get it—is pretty rich coming from a guy who recently wrote the brand story for a beloved beverage company for an overseas ad firm. I admit my relationship with this kind of, erm, storytelling has long been fraught. I once walked on a six-figure marketing job when, on a Zoom call, the CEO “explained” the Hero’s Journey to me and how it might relate to the financial services sector.

At which point, I think we can say the earlier storytelling wave was kinda dead. Actually undead—there’s a veritable zombie parade of books about story and storytelling whose titles promise to aid the journey of our heroes through a sales funnel. Volumes like The Storytelling Edge, Stories That Stick, Building a StoryBrand, Sell with a Story, and Brand Storytelling all share a common premise: that narrative isn’t a means of transmitting cultural wisdom so much as hijacking consumer consciousness.

In these books, storytelling is stripped of ambiguity, moral pretext, ritual, and risk, then redeployed as a means of motivating our behavior, especially if it’s clicking “add to cart.”

Even the venerable New York Times, long self-styled as “the rough draft of history,” offers content marketing services spun as the future of emotional manipulation. In a marketing page headlined, “How to Incorporate Storytelling in Your Content Marketing Strategy,” the “Ultimate Tool Kit” presents with anthropological awe that “storytelling is one of the most effective methods of persuasion,” helpfully reminding us that our “earliest ancestors” once told tales around the fire — of course, those tales weren’t A/B tested. Or were they?

It’s all terribly moving, in the way Edward Bernays (the putative father of PR and Freud’s nephew) realized he could bypass rational resistance with storytelling. “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses,” he wrote in Propaganda (circa 1928), “is an important element in democratic society.” Nearly a century later, the Times has helpfully distilled that philosophy into a content-marketing explainer.

The irony is exquisite: a paper that once prided itself on reporting facts now touts stories as being “22x more memorable than facts and figures.” The oldest human art form—storytelling—has been turned into a UX hack for brand awareness.

And yet. If any of this feels newly insidious, it’s only because we’re pretending it ever worked any differently. Stories have always motivated behavior—on battlefields, in locker rooms, at revival tents and picket lines. Narrative has always been how groups cohere, how individuals subordinate themselves to something larger, how belief is made actionable.

In that sense, the renewed hunger for storytelling may be less a corruption than a regression—to something older, messier, and at least ostensibly human. However compromised, a story told by a person still carries intention, context, and the possibility of that an audience might reject it (nobody asked for Teen Wolf Too). That’s more than can be said for the algorithm, which doesn’t care whether it means anything at all.

If we’re going to be moved, perhaps it’s marginally better to know who’s doing the moving—and why.