When World-Class Storytellers Meet Modern Distribution: The Power of Vibe Marketing
What if you could dramatically increase your quality content's reach without compromising your standards? Elite media professionals are quietly adopting "vibe marketing" to do exactly that.
Late at night, driving his beautiful 1990 Land Rover through the South of France, Emmy Award-winning film producer Tom Woods looks over to me and asks, "So how long did you say these TikToks should last?"
"Between 5-20 seconds," I reply.
He nods quietly, trying to decipher the seemingly impossible challenge that lies before us: How do we convince donors and audiences alike to care about sustainability initiatives happening across the Mediterranean in only 20 seconds?
Why Did an AI Engineer Quit His Job to Make Content?
Four months earlier, I had been sitting in a glass-walled office in London, building AI systems for a tech startup. The work was intellectually stimulating, the pay was excellent, and my career trajectory was clear.
Then why did I walk away?
The answer lies in a question that kept me up at night: What happens when world-class storytelling meets world-class distribution?
My father, Edward Girardet, is an award-winning war journalist whose decades of experience have produced some of the most important reporting of our time on Afghanistan. He excels at sourcing stories from hard-to-reach places, asking the right questions, and uncovering narratives others miss. Tom Woods has Emmys lining his shelf for his work as a cameraman and as a director, bringing production excellence to every project he touches.
Yet I watched as their meticulously crafted stories — stories that took months to research and produce — were being outperformed by hastily assembled content optimized purely for algorithms.
This realization sparked a pivotal moment in my career. I quit my engineering job for a simple hypothesis: What if I could learn the fundamentals of quality storytelling from masters like Tom and Edward, while helping them adapt their work to modern platforms using my background in AI and analytics?
That hypothesis led us to Nice International Airport, where we were about to pick up a team to help raise awareness for sustainable tourism and citizen science initiatives on behalf of two NGOs: PolarQuest and HelpSaveTheMed. Our budget was low and therefore the strategy was clear: leverage AI and our team's experience to create low-cost content, and optimize it to garner a large audience. Herein lies vibe marketing.
What Is Vibe Marketing Really?
Vibe Marketing is the systematic practice of packaging the same fact-rich story in multiple emotional "wrappers," testing each, and scaling the version audiences respond to most strongly.
At its core, it's the idea that storytellers can expand their content's reach and impact by creating variations of the same substantive content, testing different emotional approaches with their audience, and letting the data reveal what resonates most deeply.
In other words: what vibe do audiences most enjoy when receiving your content?
To illustrate this concept in action, The Washington Post offers a perfect example with their TikTok "Universe." Their account has amassed 1.7 million followers and 86 million likes by adapting high-quality reporting to different emotional framings. As Dave Jorgenson, Senior Video Producer at The Washington Post, explains: "People are on TikTok, YouTube, Reels and all kinds of places. They aren't necessarily looking for a paper subscription, so why not grow trust with them on platforms where they're already active?"
The results speak for themselves. When they launched their YouTube Shorts channel, repurposing their TikTok content, they saw explosive growth – jumping from 6,000 to over 100,000 followers in just months. The Post routinely reframes the same meticulously reported stories through humor, surprise, or empathy to reach Gen Z without diluting a single fact. They're not changing their journalism — they're changing the emotional wrapper that helps it travel.
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The logic behind this approach is compelling for several reasons:
AI commoditizes text, not taste. When everyone (including AI) can generate decent prose, what truly travels is the feeling a package projects. Humans process emotions much faster than logic, so you need to resonate emotionally on modern platforms.
Algorithmic feeds reward emotion-weighted signals. The platforms that control distribution increasingly prioritize content that generates emotional engagement. This isn't necessarily at odds with quality — it just means quality needs an emotional key to unlock distribution.
The Storyteller's Dilemma in 2025
That night in the Land Rover, Tom and I's discussion revealed the painful paradox of modern media:
Quality content creation has never been easier (with research tools, AI assistants, etc.)
Quality content discovery has never been harder (drowning in an ocean of mediocrity)
This contradiction stems from two converging factors that have created this challenge:
The AI-driven content flood. Large language models have lowered the cost of producing average content to near-zero, creating unprecedented noise. As one of our veteran filmmakers put it: "Everyone has the same camera now — both technically and intellectually."
Algorithm prioritisation of emotional signals. Most discovery platforms now weigh emotional engagement more heavily than authority or accuracy. The vibe has become more critical than ever.
For experienced media professionals who've spent decades honing their craft, this feels like a betrayal of everything we value. But what if there's a middle path that respects quality while embracing new distribution realities?
Our Mediterranean Experiment: Building in the Open
What I'm sharing today isn't a completed case study, but rather a real-time experiment we're currently conducting in the Mediterranean. We're building in the open, sharing our strategy and early insights as we implement vibe marketing for these conservation initiatives.
Here's how the roles break down in our experiment:
Edward Girardet: Sources the stories from hard-to-reach places, conducts interviews, and identifies the core narrative worth telling
Tom Woods: Brings production excellence to short-form content, applying his documentary expertise to ensure visual quality
My Role: Bridge the gap between their storytelling expertise and modern distribution by applying AI workflows and audience analysis
The early results are promising. In just three days of posting, our TikTok content has garnered 5,000 views and 50 followers – significantly outperforming a YouTube video on the same topic that had a considerably larger budget and took several weeks to produce.
This collaborative approach allows each person to focus on their strengths while honouring the core principles that make quality journalism valuable. Let me break down our methodology:
1. Lock Down the Non-Negotiables
The night before our first shoot in Nice, we gathered the team to establish clear boundaries:
Verified facts & data would never be compromised
Attribution & source integrity would remain sacrosanct
The mission's core values would guide everything
The fundamental narrative must remain intact
By establishing these guardrails upfront, we created a framework that respects journalistic integrity while allowing for creative distribution.
2. Identify Multiple Emotional Angles
With these boundaries established, we identified what authentic emotions already existed within our stories:
The wonder of discovering marine ecosystems
The urgency of addressing plastic pollution
The human connection of scientists dedicating their lives to conservation
The curiosity triggered by surprising microplastic facts
The key insight here is that none of these angles required inventing anything or compromising facts. They were all already present in the story itself—we simply needed to identify which ones resonated most strongly with our audience.
3. Create Variations and Test
For each key conservation story, we created multiple versions emphasizing different emotional aspects:
One leading with stunning underwater footage to evoke wonder
One starting with scientists' personal stories to highlight human connection
One beginning with surprising microplastic facts to trigger curiosity
The underlying facts remained identical across all variants. We then published these variants and let the data tell us which emotional approach resonated most strongly with our target audience.
Why This Approach Makes Sense for Experienced Media Professionals
The most profound insight driving vibe marketing is treating your audience as a black box. You can have hunches about what will engage them, but those hunches are often wrong—sometimes dramatically so.
What makes vibe marketing particularly powerful in today's media landscape is the role of AI in carrying the cognitive load of creating variations. Before, testing multiple approaches would have required massive production resources. Now, AI helps us:
Generate variations of the same core content with different emotional framings
Analyze audience responses to identify which emotions are resonating
Scale production of winning approaches across platforms
Continuously learn from audience engagement
This technological advancement transforms the economics of quality storytelling. In our pre-production planning, I've used AI to help our team generate dozens of variant scripts and hooks. Each maintains the core factual content but emphasizes different emotional entry points. This would be prohibitively time-consuming without AI assistance.
The result is a framework that allows quality storytellers like Edward and Tom to focus on what they do best—capturing substantive, meaningful stories—while AI handles the experimentation needed to optimize distribution.
Addressing the Integrity Question Head-On
When I first proposed this approach, my father was deeply skeptical. "Isn't this just manipulating emotions?" he asked, voicing a concern that many serious journalists share.
It's a valid question that deserves a thoughtful response. Here's the perspective that changed his mind:
Clickbait invents emotions; vibe marketing discovers which authentic emotions in your story resonate most.
Think of it as having multiple conversations about the same topic with different friends. You might emphasize different aspects depending on what resonates with each person, but the core truth remains unchanged.
This distinction is crucial. After seeing the approach in action, Edward now sees how this approach can help his most important stories find the audience they deserve — without compromising a single fact.
What's Next: Join Us on This Journey
I'm committed to building in the open, so I'll be sharing our journey as we implement vibe marketing for Mediterranean conservation stories. Over the coming weeks, as we gather more data from our TikTok strategy, I'll share:
The exact AI prompts we're using to generate viable emotional angles
Our template for tracking variant performance
Early results showing which emotional approaches are resonating
Insights from our team of experienced storytellers about how this approach affects their craft
I believe that experienced media professionals have an unprecedented opportunity to combine their unmatched storytelling abilities with modern distribution techniques. The key is not abandoning your expertise but supplementing it with data-driven insights about which emotional aspects of your stories create the strongest initial connection.
I invite you to follow along and even experiment alongside us. If you're working on substantive stories that deserve a wider audience, consider how applying vibe marketing might help you discover which emotional aspects of your story create the strongest initial connection with your audience.
Together, we can ensure that quality storytelling not only survives but thrives in the algorithm age.
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AI engineer turned content strategist. As the son of veteran journalist Edward Girardet, I bridge data science and storytelling to revolutionize content marketing. My newsletter delivers practical AI tools and frameworks that help brands and creators craft targeted stories that resonate with specific audiences and drive measurable engagement. Join me at the frontier where algorithms meet storytelling.
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AI engineer turned content strategist. I help brands and creators craft targeted stories that resonate with specific audiences and drive measurable engagement.