So, What's the Story?

We're living in a strange moment: everyone suddenly has access to world-class writing tools with Claude and ChatGPT. Anyone can generate ad copy, captions, product descriptions, email sequences, blogs, social posts – you name it.

And the irony is that because anyone can write anything, the importance of real storytelling has never been greater.

If every brand or any person can produce endless content, what actually resonates?

The answer today looks a lot less like polished brand campaigns and a lot more like…people.

We see this everywhere in marketing and advertising. Influencers have replaced traditional ads not because they have bigger budgets, but because people form parasocial relationships with them. You try the skincare brand your favorite creator uses. You buy the leggings your favorite fitness coach wears. You copy the exact workout from the person you've been silently following for months. Entire communities form around personalities, and at the center of it all is the human story.

Musings from a Marketing Expert

Just this week, Russell was at an event talking to someone who runs performance marketing campaigns for major companies like Perplexity and Eleven Labs.

He said his firm has a new strategy when it comes to running marketing campaigns: test dozens of creative variations, each with its own storyline, and let the algorithm decide which narrative sticks.

When you treat your brand like a storyteller instead of a broadcaster, you dramatically increase your odds. It's not about having one perfect message anymore, it's about exploring many ways to tell your unique story.

The Medium Evolves, The Story Stays Human

Human stories are one of the few things AI will never replace. They create connection. They signal identity. They make us feel seen.

What is changing is the way those stories travel. Social media did this first. Instagram and TikTok made our personal milestones into public stories:

Graduate college? Post the cap-and-gown photo. Get married? Share the wedding trailer. Go skiing? Drop the hero shot at the summit (or the photos of the après-ski bender).

People have always connected through stories, but social media platforms made those stories infinitely shareable.

Now algorithms decide which of those stories surface. And with AI in the mix, those algorithms are getting hyper-specific.

The Age of Obsessed Micro-Communities

People gravitate to the things they're obsessed with. If you've ever been on Reddit, you know those things can get very niche. Just to name a few…

r/onebag – A community of self-proclaimed "onebaggers" who optimize packing down to a science.

r/fountainpens: if you thought penmanship was a lost art, think again. There is an entire community on reddit obsessed with fountain pens – trading ink reviews, nib adjustments, and handwriting progress updates.

The point is: these micro-communities go deep. They pore over every post, every comment, every detail.

And with obsession comes influence—fanatics look for storytellers who share their exact interests, their exact quirks, their exact worldview.

That's where the most interesting creators live.

Spoiler Alert: We're also Obsessive

As many of you know, we are racket-sports people. We've written about it a few times by now. Russell is deep in the padel vortex, and it's taken over Julia's algorithm to the point where every other video is an insane 25-shot rally.

So we took what we know from:

• Storytelling
• niche communities
• fanatic audiences
• influencer marketing

…and built something for ourselves first: RacketAlpha.

It started as a simple tool to track creators in the racket-sports world whose content we couldn't get enough of. We built it in two weeks, entirely with AI tools. It wasn't meant to be a product—just something useful for our own curiosity and obsession.

But we quickly realized… Sure, there are influencer platforms out there. But the most effective campaigns are almost always the hyper-specific ones. The creators whose stories feel authentic because they are deeply rooted in their niche communities.

This is why micro-influencer campaigns outperform macro-influencers almost every time. If you follow a micro-influencer, it's intentional—you're bought into their community, their content, their story.

And racket sports are full of these creators: coaches, reviewers, local legends, players documenting their progress. People who care way too much (in the best way possible) about rackets, strings, grips, spin, angles, strategy, and the perfect tweener.

RacketAlpha exists to surface those voices; the ones telling real, human stories inside a very specific world.

Because in an age where AI can generate infinite content, the only thing that truly resonates is the niche, the human, the obsessive, the story.