At the end of last year The Wall Street Journal reported in “Companies Are Desperately Seeking ‘Storytellers” that the percentage of LinkedIn job postings including the term “storytellers” doubled as businesses scrambled to cut through AI-generated noise.

Recently, I noticed a new article from the same reporter, “Marketers Are Rebranding as ‘Engineers’ to Survive the AI Era.” Huh? 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. Which is the important skill?

An Eclectic Education Journey

I started out as an Engineering major. I was attracted to process thinking: the systematic, iterative way of solving problems. But there wasn’t much creativity. I spent time as a Marketing major but my first class was accounting where creativity was not encouraged. I finished with Journalism and a concentration in Advertising.

I also took a lot of liberal arts classes along the way: 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 and explaining processes for strategy and creativity.

Process Only Gets You So Far

In my advertising career we 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 marketing performance results. It wasn’t until I began my academic career that I figured out what made the difference.

With time to reflect, I researched what I knew: advertising creativity. What is the difference between okay campaigns and exceptional ones? 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.

You Don’t Need Engineers To Improve Process.

What about the Marketing Engineer? As best I can tell, this is a person taking the same processes and outsourcing some of it to AI. I see how that could be valuable.

But anyone in current positions and job titles can add AI to processes and outsource routine tasks to increase time on more important ones.

Everyone follows a process. Everyone does consumer research to inform decisions. AI can speed some of that up. Rare is the Storyteller.

Storytelling Is An Enduring Skill That Transcends Trendy Titles

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 in 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 seen in my studies, professional career, research and teaching the value of storytelling. AI doesn’t have lived, physical experiences and can’t feel emotions to truly understand another human’s life. That’s needed in many careers. In the first WSJ article, “Storytelling” rose in listings as a skill in different jobs not a single trendy new job title.

In a College of Management, I see how storytelling is relevant to all our students preparing for careers in sales, human resources, management, analytics, entrepreneurship, finance, and yes, accounting. I’ve also taught marketing and storytelling to engineering students.

Engineers Will Not Replace Marketing And Communications 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, Strategists and Storytellers. As 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 strategic and creative process. It doesn’t replace the need for storytelling. But AI can accelerate certain parts of the process.

This boost in speed can be reinvested in valuable human thinking time. AI doesn’t replace human instinct, taste, or empathy needed for insights, ideas, and story. This applies to marketing, advertising, public relations, and other communications professionals.

AI Automation Is A Threat To Storytelling

One thing we did discover in writing the second edition is a warning about types of automation that impact story. This includes an example described in the WSJ Brand Engineer article – 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. This is what creates and releases tension. It’s what makes you feel sympathy and empathy for the characters.

Imagine if your favorite movie or novel randomly mixed scenes, dialogue, events and characters. Would it have the same appeal?

The Lesson Is 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 shows 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 story in Poetics, written over 2,300 years ago. Story dramas held audience attention in Greco-Roman amphitheaters across the antient world.

Shakespeare’s works have been performed in countless cities and countries for more than 400 years – he was a master storyteller.

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 millennia-old practice that always works, is always needed and AI can’t authentically tell. 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.