Can Stories Save Us London Agency Jaiku Is Putting 60 People In A Room To Find Out

Creative Boom: News Branding Can stories save us? JAIKU is putting 60 people in a room to find out The JAIKU Storytelling Summit lands in London this September, bringing founders, marketers and creative leaders together to ask whether narrative still has the power to change things. Written By: Tom May 13 July 2026 Jaiku Live Marketing Ideation, June 2025 (Credit: Adam Kang) In a media landscape drowning in content, the question "Can stories save us?" might sound counterintuitive. But Marianne Olaleye, founder of brand storytelling agency JAIKU, believes narrative does have the power to change things.

And so on Thursday, 17 September, she's convening 60 people at Second Home Spitalfields, London E1, to find out. She's being deliberate about every detail: the venue, the running time and, perhaps most tellingly, the size. The JAIKU Storytelling Summit runs from 9.30am to 11.30am, with speakers confirmed from Adobe, ustwo Games, YouTube, Arcadis, Digital Voices and Cassava Republic Press. It's a programme built around cross-industry collision, deliberately bringing together voices that rarely share a stage.

For Marianne, stories aren't just a communications tool: they move economies, shape culture and, in the wrong hands, put the wrong people in positions of power. The summit's premise is that they can only do good if we're willing to seek out perspectives beyond our own bubble. Jaiku Live Marketing Ideation, June 2025 (Credit: Adam Kang) Jaiku Live Marketing Ideation, June 2025 (Credit: Adam Kang) It's a characteristically ambitious framing for what is, at heart, a two-hour morning event. But Marianne is unapologetic about starting small, with a longer ambition to build something on a par with SXSW or CultureCon already firmly in mind.

Two hours, no panel fatigue The programme spans three sessions. Building New Worlds pairs game designers from ustwo Games with urban planners from Arcadis to explore how both disciplines build stories that people can literally inhabit. Get Your Story Straight features a creative director from Adobe on the process of finding the story before you try to tell it. The third session, From Griots to Influencers, may be the most provocative. It's a look at how stories travel across generations and what brands consistently miss when they obsess over younger audiences.

Just in case you were wondering, Griots are West African oral historians: the original community storytellers, carrying cultural memory long before the influencer economy existed. The panel features the co-founder of Cassava Republic Press, one of Africa's leading publishing houses, alongside voices from the creator economy. Jaiku Live Marketing Ideation, June 2025 (Credit: Adam Kang) Jaiku Live Marketing Ideation, June 2025 (Credit: Adam Kang) It's a topic Marianne is emphatic about.

Older generations, she argues, have enormous spending power yet remain underrepresented in mainstream advertising, and brands' fixation with Gen Z comes at a real cost. She'd like to see more aunties, grandparents and uncles in campaigns; not as a novelty, but as a reflection of where attention and money actually dominate in our society. The core argument is that while the messengers have changed across the centuries, the underlying principles of storytelling haven't: what's shifted is who gets a voice and who gets platformed.

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The JAIKU Storytelling Summit addresses a significant trend in branding by emphasizing the importance of narrative, particularly from underrepresented voices, making it highly relevant and impactful for brand strategy professionals.