I notice this all the time, both as a marketer and as a reader.
Scrolling, half-engaged, half-sceptical. Wondering where the seams are. Was this made with care, or is it just another thing that sounds right?
There is more content than ever, but less confidence in it, and with AI making it easy to produce things that feel polished and coherent, those qualities don’t really tell us much anymore.
For a long time, the default response was output. MORE POSTS!!! MORE UPDATES!!! MORE CHANNELS!!! And for a while, that worked. But that was when fewer people were publishing and attention was less fragmented.
Now it mostly adds to the noise.
What seems to be emerging instead is something quieter. Less urgency around saying something new every time, and more interest in building stories people can return to. Stories with a thread running through them, rather than something invented from scratch each time, or recurring series where people know what to expect.
A Wall Street Journal article recently pointed out that LinkedIn job ads mentioning “storytelling” have doubled in the past year. Teams that once sat across social, comms and content are being pulled together under one idea. Even executives are reaching for the language of storytelling when they talk about growth and trust.
We’re calling it. This is the year of the storyteller.
You can see this playing out in unexpected places too. Kantar’s research into recent Christmas campaigns found that many of the strongest-performing ads were not new ideas at all. They were returns. Familiar characters, familiar worlds. Stories people already knew, revisited rather than replaced. In the noisiest moment of the year, familiarity turned out to be the thing that cut through. (This one was my favourite ⬇️)
This kind of storytelling is not about adding emotion for emotion’s sake. It is about continuity. About building narratives people recognise and trust over time.
That distinction matters most in purpose-led work, where trust is fragile and the stakes are high.
At Laundry Lane, our work is about creating the right conditions for human stories to be told with care. Stories that do more than inform. Stories that connect, deepen understanding and, over time, can stir hearts and spark positive social change.
In practice, that means listening before we create, protecting the people whose stories are being shared, and designing formats that allow ideas to travel across film, social and speech without losing what made them matter in the first place.
In a year where anyone can generate content, that distinction feels worth holding onto.
This is the first piece in our Year of the Storyteller series. Over the coming weeks, we will explore storytelling as continuity, the craft behind work that lasts, and the responsibility that comes with telling sensitive stories in high-stakes environments.
