Storytelling - the digital buzzword of 2025?

If there was a word of the year in digital for 2024, it was authenticity. In 2025, it’s storytelling. Every article, LinkedIn post, and PD session seems to circle back to it. We’re told to “tell better stories,” “own our narrative,” “connect through storytelling", and honestly, I hear myself saying it too. Telling my students the importance of a good story. Encouraging organisations to “focus on storytelling.” Advising digital teams to bring more narrative into their content.

But lately, I’ve caught even myself asking, what does that actually mean? What even is storytelling?

Storytelling isn’t a content trend; it’s the foundation of how people understand who you are and what you stand for. The best storytelling doesn’t start with a camera or a caption. It starts with purpose, understanding why a story needs to be told, who it represents, and how it contributes to something bigger.

It’s about context, ownership, and connection. It’s about elevating voices that matter, not just producing another piece of content. A real story has a heartbeat. It’s intentional, contextual, and connected. It answers questions we often skip over in the rush to publish:
✨Whose story is this? Are we amplifying diverse voices or defaulting to the same faces and narratives?
✨Who’s telling it? What perspectives shape it and who’s left out of the frame?
✨Why are we telling it? Is this story contributing to the purpose, or just filling a post schedule?
✨Do people actually care? Does it make them feel something, or simply scroll past?
✨…maybe the hardest question: how are we resourcing it?

Storytelling takes more than creativity. It takes time, access, trust, and alignment. It’s not something squeezed in at the end of the week or added to a campaign when there’s leftover budget. It needs to be built into how youwork, with teams that have the space to listen and the mandate to tell the truth, not just promote the brand. Resourcing storytelling means seeing it as infrastructure, not output. It means funding editors, producers, and creatives who can uncover nuance and culture, not just engagement metrics. It means creating systems that reward depth over speed, and connection over consistency. You can’t build stories of belonging in environments obsessed with volume and immediacy.

In sport, the stories that last aren’t always the ones with the biggest reach. They’re the ones that reveal humanity: the volunteer who opens the sheds before dawn, the moment between teammates after a loss, the local kid who finally makes it. They’re the stories that build identity, not just impressions. Before we keep saying “tell better stories,” we need to pause and ask what that actually means and whether we’re creating the space, structure, and support to make it possible. Because real storytelling only happens when we resource it properly, value it deeply, and earn the right to tell it - beyond the buzzword.