I’ve had a weird career.
I’ve swapped in and out of industries: newspaper and magazine journalism, working in adland for one of the big agencies, and then switching to B2B SaaS as a marketer. I’ve been the media, the agency and the brand.
I’ve been in-house; freelance; I’ve co-founded and run a business, and I’ve also been very, very unemployed. At various times I’ve volunteered for causes or organisations about which I feel strongly and on three separate occasions I’ve formalised this by becoming a trustee or director for charities.
I always needed variety. I don’t like to feel pigeon-holed. The only thing I always knew about what I wanted career-wise was that I didn’t want to do the same day, repeated over and over.
My sassy 10-year-old daughter enjoys asking me what I do for a living because I find it so hard to articulate who and what I am in a single line; she enjoys seeing my face contort as I try to explain myself.
My brother-in-law has not had a weird career. He’s been incredibly successful in the City and had two jobs in his whole life. He’s been in his current role for 20 years.
He has a much easier answer to the “so what are you doing with yourself these days?” question, casually asked by distant relatives during the small talk stage of family events.
Basically, I’m a storyteller. I didn’t become one. I was a storyteller when I was a kid, right through school, throughout my teens and then as I jumped into journalism.
There’s an episode coming up of Do More With Less - the podcast I host for OrbitalX - with Joe Lazer, author of brand new bestseller Super Skill: Why Storytelling Is the Superpower of the AI Age. I can’t wait to meet Joe and I also can’t wait to read the book - it’s been a smash in the US but doesn’t come out here in the UK for another month.
In a recent post on Linkedin, Joe noted that Netflix and OpenAI are offering salaries of up to $775,000 per year for storytelling roles. Anthropic, he added, has hired 80+ storytelling and comms roles in recent months, many of which pay $500K+ in total compensation.
Two years ago, nobody was interested in storytelling as a skill. I’m certain I won’t have been the only one advised to stop using the word in recruitment processes altogether and to ensure it was nowhere to be seen on my resume.
While it’s lovely that we storytellers are back in fashion, I’ve seen enough turnover of feast and famine to suspect our latest golden age will be short-lived. I’d also argue there isn’t a boardroom in the world committed enough to a storytelling strategy to believe any candidate can sustain or justify these salaries past ‘year 1’. I’ll ask Joe how he sees it but for me, that gravy train will break down as soon as the trend-pendulum swings back to the harder, more tangible, measurable stuff.
What I do know though is that storytelling isn’t and never has been my most valuable skill.
The element of my professional ‘self’ that I’d price above anything storytelling - although maybe it comes more naturally to storytellers - is that I’m kind of ‘elastic’.
That’s the best word I could think of for it; (agile is loaded with all sorts of tech-bro context and flexible sounds like I lack agency).
What I mean by elastic, was well articulated last week by a marketing recruiter I’ve started following on Linkedin named Sinead Willis.
“The strongest marketers I know have the “messiest” careers,” Willis wrote. “They’ve worked inhouse, freelanced, taken breaks, been laid off, jumped into startups that blew up and startups that blew apart.
“Every one of those moves built perspective.They’ve learned to do more with less, build from zero, and fix what’s broken. But too many job descriptions still cling to linear career logic, as if the only valuable experience is uninterrupted, upward, and corporate.
“The next decade belongs to marketers who’ve done the messy stuff because they’re the ones who know what to do when the playbook stops working.”
I hope Willis is right. Not just because I agree those of us with what Sunday Times Bestseller stars Sarah Ellis and Helen Tupper call ‘Squiggly Careers’, are genuinely better set up to navigate uncertainty than execs with more simple or linear paths.
But also because playbooks have and will continue to stop working. And by focusing so heavily on channels and tactics - traditionally prioritised by B2B marketing ahead of story or mission - so much marketing is as forgettable for the recipient as it is joyless for the marketer to create.
It’s work that leaves our frustrated bosses wondering why they pay for marketing that leaves their business offer and brand virtually invisible; why we literally invite our customers to disregard us.
And at that point - well, internal interest in marketing disappears. Ambition and perspective shrink; marketing strategies start being built around costs rather than outcomes. Investment is cut to a point where marketing programmes feel relatively risk-free.
Unfortunately, that’s often the point at which a marketing plan stops achieving anything even vaguely useful. Risk-free marketing is the most expensive marketing there is. You’re investing time, money and work for literally nothing to happen. Any ‘message’ simply drifts over the heads of your audience without touching them. And the worst part? Nobody cares. Sure, there are regular complaints or snide remarks from the sales team but that’s often restricted to a low-level and harmless hum. Things get done badly; with zero love or craft and nobody gets held to account.
So instead of proper campaign planning according to strategic business ambitions and targets, marketing becomes the act of ticking off busy activities on stagnant spreadsheets.
The marketing goal is no longer business transformation or growth as it once was; it’s now merely a watered-down case study or the moving deadline for ‘that blog’.
This marketing death-spiral has been a clear risk in every team I’ve ever been a part of. Even in a high-functioning set-up, it’s never more than a broken relationship or a few bad pieces of work away from being triggered.
Being elastic is what prevents it. Being elastic is the opposite of being a ‘good culture fit’ - of over compliance; of following direction from non-marketers without question.
Diversity and inclusion conversations have quite rightly focused on women, people of colour and LGBTQ employees. That shouldn’t stop - we’re far from done in that regard. But the conversations should also include people who see the world differently - the neurodiverse and the creatives. People who abhor a status quo and can barely hold themselves together if they can’t comfortably raise opposing views or ask thorny questions.
And as a leader or even just a colleague, it’s difficult being difficult. Any fool in marketing can prance about on conference stages winning applause from listeners with speeches about creativity.
Actually doing it behind closed office doors amid the stress of trying to keep a business afloat is, more often than not, painful. Hell, it’s not as if you’re telling your colleagues something they don’t know. Your leadership already understands that not all B2B marketing plans should look the same; that homogeneity stalls careers and is crushing and counter-productive to hopes of growth. But the alternative is hard. It requires stretch, empathy, big listening ears and active imagination. And the bravery to sound and look different; to take a risk.
This - this is the real job of your storyteller; your elastic colleague. They stretch and lengthen their worldviews, way past the boundaries of a functional marketing programme. They imagine and incorporate the needs of customers, partners - all the different stakeholders - and then move it all beyond commonplace business or sales patter. They’ll tie it all together and wrap it into an actual story - something memorable, powerful.
My partners at OrbitalX refer to this as a superpower of mine. It’s a relief and a blessing to find smart business people that see the value. If you’ve felt at work like I have in various jobs, you’ll know what I mean. Sometimes we’re seen as interesting misfits; ‘loved-but-not-always-understood’ ideas machines.
Other times we can, I guess, come across quite annoying. A CEO might keep you around because your constructive discontent is regularly useful but elsewhere, colleagues just see you as the person that never stops asking bloody questions.
If you’re lucky you’ll have had more than your fair share of jobs, businesses or bosses who knew your value and were determined to hold on to you at all costs. Most people in life can never say this but work is a legitimate pleasure for as long as there’s someone who needs you to keep that ideas motor turning; that understands there’s nobody else on the team with your perspective, skill-set or ability to create ‘something out of nothing’; right?
Sure, you might not always fit comfortably into how organisations have to work but it’s possible to find the right blend of compliance and defiance.
‘Compliance’ because most good changes are built on compromise, incremental steps and bringing people with you (but also ‘compliance’ because you need to keep your job, right?). And ‘defiance’ because without people like you, teams and businesses rarely improve and adapt. At OrbitalX, I’m surrounded by people like me. They’re in every function and cover every department. It should be chaos but somehow it works.
Marketing is changing and we need new thinking to address it - not new marketing skills; we should all expose ourselves to serious training and understanding of the discipline - but new approaches to meeting and exceeding expectations and sustaining growth. Competition is now greater, pressures are heavier and implosions occur much quicker.
Reduced headcount and increased investment into technology aren’t the drivers - they’re the results. The driver is an open debate about what marketing is, what it needs to be, how it gets done and what kind of people and skills are required to make it succeed.
Inflated salaries for storytelling roles won’t last; the bubble will surely burst soon enough. But for the first time in my career I don’t feel like a lone, wide-eyed ‘crazy’. Everything is on the table and up for grabs; there’s a massive opportunity for the elastic, the resilient and the versatile.
