In these past few weeks, how many times have you seen someone claim, “2026 will be the year of the storyteller?”
You almost certainly did NOT hear it here first. đ A lot of the marketing bros and self-proclaimed thought leaders are acting like this is a big revelation or a masterful prediction, too.
However, any marketer whoâs being remotely honest with you knows: of course storytelling will be vital in marketing in 2026⌠because every year is the year of the storyteller.
AI-generated content has become predictably predictable
As the buzz around LLMs and AI-generated content grew louder, a lot of us in creative industries predicted that AI-generated content wouldnât measure up in terms of quality. Visual artists, in particular, say that a machine simply canât bring the human element into the work it produces. It creates without soul.
Even the more practical-minded of usâdesigners, copywriters, people who create to solve specific problemsâwarned that AI-generated content wouldnât bring anything new to the party.
LLMs are trained on content that already existsâoften without express permission from the original creators. It then churns out it content based on that learning⌠which essentially means that nothing it creates is entirely new.
Now, at the end of 2025, the AI boosters in marketing are finally noticing: as more AI-generated content enters the online space, everything has started to sound the same. This brings us back to the same, unavoidable question that businesses and marketers have been asking for ages: how the heck do we stand out from the other guys in our field?
Storytelling in marketing never actually left
We’ve seen this before: storytelling is the hot strategy, the key tactic, the thing you must implement, unless you want to get left behind. Storytelling is far from new, thoughâitâs older than the internet, and older than a lot of the guys who think that AI can somehow replicate or replace it.
How old? Well, a colleague of mine left her big agency job, armed with her knowledge of marketing, and determined to bring storytelling to small business.
That was well over a decade ago⌠and at the time, the big agency she left was over 50 years old. Do that math.
And yet, capitalists, and optimization wonks, and AI fanboys, and, frankly, all of us who feel too frazzled by the act of trying to survive to even think about marketing, desperately want there to be a shortcut. And, there are folks in tech spaces looking to “optimize” or build shortcuts for us to collectively latch onto.
In the end, though, this keeps happening: launching a website doesnât make your business boom? Try storytelling! Viral social media posts donât solve your problems? You need storytelling! AI-generated content doesnât move the needle? STORYTELLING!
It always comes back around to this, because storytelling has always been the fuel that powers ANY good online marketing effort. No matter what tactics youâre using, you have to share a message that your audience cares about. If the story isnât there, your audience isnât motivated to listen.
Fundamentals, fundamentals, victory
Back in the day, the captain of my roller derby team loved using catch phrases to remind us why we worked so hard. Weâd drill out something mind-numbingly basic, because youâre never too good for the basics.
Then, when the fancy strategies didnât gel, and the game was spiraling out of our control, my captain would say, âfundamentals, fundamentals, victory!â Weâd remember what we practiced, and those basics would get us the win.
The thing is, the same thing that applies to sports also applies to, well, just about everything we strive to do in life: we have to get the fundamentals on lock before we can start winning.
That means we canât keep grabbing at shiny objects and shortcuts, while we ignore the things that really matter.
No LLM will be able to do our storytelling for us.
No number of Likes or Shares on a social media post will bump your revenue if it doesnât earn you any clickthroughs.
No website is going to serve your businessâ growth if it doesnât get your ideal audience to actually book you.
So, yes, 2026 will, indeed, be the year of the storyteller⌠and 2027 will be, too. Itâs high time for us all to leave behind the shortcuts, and start actually telling our story.
“But really, how DO I stand out?”
Whether you need a whole new website, or just someone to hold your hand while you draft your next marketing email, I’m here to help you answer that question.
Originally published on The Radical Marketer, our weekly newsletter about dealing with online marketing when you’re a bleeding heart with a business. Subscribe here to receive every issue, straight to your inbox.
