At the end of last year The Wall Street Journal reported in “Companies Are Desperately Seeking ‘Storytellers” that corporate job postings for designated “storytellers” doubled as they scrambled to cut through AI-generated noise.

At the end of last month, I noticed a new article from the same reporter Kaite Deighton, “Marketers Are Rebranding as ‘Engineers’ to Survive the AI Era.” This juxtaposition struck me, not only because we seem to have moved on quickly, but also because I have engineering and storytelling in my background.

Eclectic: My Education Journey

I started out as an Engineering major. I was attracted to process thinking: a systematic, iterative way to solving problems. But there wasn’t much creativity. Then I spent time as a Marketing major. Unfortunately, my first class was accounting where creativity was not encouraged. I ended up finishing my studies in Journalism with a concentration in Advertising – where I learned storytelling.

I also took a lot of liberal arts classes: Short story writing, poetry, photography, video production, drawing, anthropology, film. But I never forgot what I learned in Engineering. One of my strengths has been uncovering processes to strategy and creativity.

Process: It Only Gets You So Far.

In my ad career I followed a strategic and creative process. That got us to good solutions most of the time for our clients. But sometimes we hit it out of the park with creative solutions that exceeded expectations – winning creative awards and delivering exponential sales, market share, brand awareness, etc. It wasn’t until I began my academic career that I figured out what made the difference.

I had time to reflect. I researched what I knew: advertising creativity. What was the difference between the okay campaigns and the exceptional ones that truly resonated with people? Three of our own research studies one on Super Bowl ads, one on YouTube ads, a new one on Instagram static Posts, and a synthesis of other research later I’m convinced the difference is storytelling.

Everyone follows a process. Everyone does consumer research to inform decisions. Rare is the Storyteller. What about the Marketing Engineer? As best I can tell, this is a person taking the same processes we’ve been following for decades and outsourcing some of it to AI. I see how that could be valuable. But I think anyone in their current positions and job titles could be adding AI to current processes outsourcing routine tasks to increase time on more important tasks.

Storytellers: A Skill Not A Trendy Job Title

Perhaps this becomes a temporary position that bridges a gap, but eventually I think it goes away as everyone just learns to integrate AI into their processes. We’ve already seen this pattern the job title Prompt Engineer. As Fortune reported last May, “This Six-Figure Role Was Predicted to Be the Next Big Thing–It’s Already Obsolete Thanks to AI” The reporter describes how this once hyped-up career, Prompt Engineer has shifted from a unique job title to a skill needed by everyone to succeed.

I’ve consistently seen in my studies, professional career, research and teaching the value of storytelling. Only humans can truly understand other humans and have lived, physical experiences and felt true emotions to engage and conect via story. In the first WSJ article, “Storytelling” was appearing in listings as a skill for cross-discipline jobs not a single trendy new job title.

Engineers: They’re Not Replacing Storytellers

I recently turned in the files for the Second Edition of my book with Michael Coolsen Brand Storytelling (due out next Spring). One thing we learned about storytelling and AI is that Engineers are not replacing Creatives and Storytellers. Muskan Manchanda explained in Agency Reporter,

“Spend a day inside any agency today and you’ll notice something feels different. The brainstorms are still animated. The whiteboards are still full. But ideas are taking shape faster. Generative AI has quietly woven itself into the everyday rhythm of agency life — not as a dramatic disruption, but as a steady undercurrent changing how work gets done.”

Generative AI doesn’t replace or change the foundations of the creative process, but it can accelerate certain parts of it. This boost in speed can be reinvested back into valuable human “thinking time.” AI doesn’t replace human instinct, taste, or empathy. It can save some time allowing teams to focus less on manual route taks and more on meaning.

Automation: A Threat To Storytelling:

One thing we did discover is a warning about types of automation described in the WSJ Brand Engineer article such as automating media buying. Google’s performance max (P-Max) campaigns removes the human from the process. Instead of creating distinct ads for different media, marketers upload an “Asset Group” of raw elements (up to 15 headlines, 5 descriptions, 20 images, and 5 videos). Google’s AI dynamically mixes, matches, and deploys the pieces across YouTube, Search, Display, Gmail, and Maps.

AI optimization like this sounds great at first, but it removes the brand storytelling. Our Five-Act Story framework (and any story) requires a seqential series of events that capture your attention and move you through the ups and downs of the plot. Imagine if your favorite movie or novel randomly mixed scenes, dialogue, events and characters. Would it have the same appeal?

Lesson: Avoid Shinny Object Syndrome:

I think Marketing Engineer may be another sign of what Marketoonist Tom Fishburne calls “Shinny Object Syndrome.” He observed how marketers love chasing the shiny new thing. His illustration features a group of dogs in a conference room that should be looking at a marketing chart on the screen, but instead they switch mid-sentence to looking out the window saying “Look, Squirrel!” Storytelling isn’t a shinny new thing or a squirrel.

As we explain in our book, storytelling is one of the oldest strategies in the world. Aristotle laid out the basic structure for storytelling in Poetics, written over 2,300 years ago. Story dramas held audience attention in Greco-Roman amphitheaters across the antient world. The works of William Shakespeare have been performed in countless cities and countries for more than 400 years – he was a master storyteller.

And yes, modern marketers are called to be storytellers too. Seth Godin wisely says,

“Marketing = storytelling, and everything an organization does supports the story. So everyone is in the marketing department, and a company either tells a story that people care about, or their story disappears.”

Storytelling is a millenia old practice that always works and is always needed. Why would we throw that away to become a Marketing Engineer? Let the Engineers be Engineers. Let Marketers be Storytellers.

Here’s my AI disclosure: I didn’t use AI in writing this. I’m not against using AI in the writing process. I’ve written about AI without using AI and I ‘ve experimented writing about AI using AI. It can be a valuable tool. In this article, I choose not to use it.