Netflix and OpenAI are offering up to $775,000(!) per year for storytelling roles. I’d argue we need to rethink the role at this point.
We need to move from storytellers to story creators. One is reactive, the other is proactive by definition. In practice the difference is massive.
Most marketers sit around waiting for a new product feature, a campaign launch, a funding round or an award win to tell the world about. That waiting is the whole problem. Because most weeks, nothing arrives.
They take what already happened and package it the right way for the target group. That’s an event based translation job. It only works if something happened.
A story creator produces the narrative worth telling in the first place. You don’t wait for something relevant to happen. You create it.
The truth is that no company has newsworthy stories every week. Most have 4-5 big moments a year. Yet the feed asks for something new 52 weeks a year, and attention spans are short.
That gap is the actual job for the story creator.
So before you hire your next storyteller, ask whether you need a storyteller or a story creator. Plenty of people can tell a story about something that happened. Only very few can create one from nothing, every week.
