Happy Sunday, Everyone!
I hope you’re all enjoying the final few weekends of summer – it’s hard to believe that Labor Day is on the extended forecast, back to school is in full swing (it seems like graduation was just yesterday) and the NFL season is only weeks away (Go Birds).
Over these past few weeks, I’ve found myself thinking more about the implication of AI in the advertising/marketing industry going forward - and one conclusion I can’t shake is this:
The value of taste will increase exponentially.
GenAI makes the cost of creation approach zero - whether it’s images, videos, code, content - ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude can create it for $10-$20 a month. Divided across dozens (or hundreds) of instances, the cost per piece of content quickly drops to mere pennies. There’s certainly a floor on the cost, and I expect these tools will raise prices over time. But - regardless of whether those platforms are $10, $20 or even $200/mo, the cost is a minuscule fraction of traditional, human labor costs.
The impacts of this are profound. As the one-and-only Aaron Orendoroff posted on X last week, “When the cost of getting answers drops to zero, the value of asking the right questions compounds exponentially.”
He’s right. And that same logic applies much broader.
I was speaking to a good friend who owns a small SaaS company this weekend. In the midst of our conversation, he dropped a bomb (of sorts): thanks to Claude Code, his cost of launching new features had fallen by almost 95%. What once took him a month’s worth of nights + weekends to create, he could now do in an afternoon or a Sunday morning while his wife took the kids to church.
It’s not difficult to see where this goes: the cost of shipping a new feature for a more established brand will fall from $500,000 to $10,000. The cost of creating a new ad from $1,000 to $10 (something I’ve already discussed here). The cost of doing an influencer campaign from $5,000 to $2,500. The list goes on and on.
Yes, the quality of some of the work done by AI tools is hot trash today - but the quality of work done by some agencies and in-house teams can (quite generously) be characterized in a similar manner. But, unlike those teams, the quality of work done by LLMs will improve, and it will improve in short order. Just look at how much better Gemini has gotten from 1.0 to 2.5 - it’s not 10% better, it’s 10x better. Maybe GenAI will be the thing that finally breaks Moore’s law, but maybe not.
Regardless of what happens in the ongoing development of GenAI, I believe the following remains true: the way in which we approach creation vs. curation has fundamentally changed. There’s no going back. And owners, investors and marketers need to re-think both how they approach their roles and the skills they hire for accordingly.
For as long as I can remember, cost was the forcing function in organizations. Each of the above initiatives (features, ads, campaigns) had a substantial cost associated; the organization couldn’t afford to do it all, so someone (the CMO, CEO, VP of marketing, agency) had to make a call: this is what we’re going to do.
In one sense, that’s an optimization problem: what should we do in order to maximize the impact of our limited resources? In a much broader sense, that is taste.
Taste is the uncanny, almost intuitive ability to know what should exist and (more importantly) what should not. What will just “feel right” - and what will feel wanting.
But for almost all of our lives, taste was acquired through forced choices (that’s the forcing function above) – investments were zero sum in a way that was prohibitive. A dollar invested into product development is a dollar that’s no longer available for growth; a dollar directed to an influencer campaign is a dollar that’s no longer available for hiring that CS person. That’s no longer the case. You can have the ad campaign, the influencers and the new function, because the cost associated has decreased 70%, 80%, 90%, 95%.
That leaves taste itself as the most underrated competitive advantage.
Rick Rubin (admittedly) has no technical know-how or skill in music production – yet many of the biggest stars seek him out when they need a chart-topping hit.
Apple doesn’t use standard UGC; instead, they shoot each one like a piece of cinema….and tell you that it was made on your iPhone.
Liquid Death doesn’t run standard water ads featuring babbling brooks and clear mountain springs; they stage (fake) satanic rituals, sell “murder your thirst” as a lifestyle - and people willingly pay 3x more to join the cult.
Each one of these requires creative chops and good aesthetics, to be sure – but that (at the very least, that alone) is not taste. Brands try to acquire taste by bringing in the “Award-Winning” creative shops, mimicking a Webby-darling website design, using a trendy font or integrating a trending sound. Candidly, that’s why so much “performance” creative falls flat - it’s the Shein-lite version of something that was once tasteful, but is now overdone. It’s the Cerulean Blue sweater that Andy wears in the Devil Wears Prada (if you don’t get the reference, watch the scene). It’s a photo that’s been copied, and the copy has been copied, and so on and so forth, until what’s left is a grainy, partially-cut-off facsimile of something that was once awe-inspiring.
And that’s what’s missing from marketing. That’s the skill that needs to be solved.
Real taste isn’t in imitating what’s been done; it’s in the obsession of creating a thing worth duplicating. Real taste is the B2B brand that refuses to run standard LinkedIn Ads, and instead shoots a mini-documentary that makes their target audience feel like the savior. It’s the lead-gen agency that nukes dozens of high-performing assets, because they attract the wrong audience. It’s the direct mail piece that uses a premium paper with just a hint of cedar, because the brand’s identity is rooted in craftsmanship and the creative knows that just the subtle whiff of nostalgia is enough to trigger a memory.
These are the details that no-one notices until you point them out; they’re so subtle, so seemingly irrelevant that they feel as if they were always there.
That’s what we need more of in marketing today. Yes, more ads are nice. Yes, better landing pages are a must. Yes, more intentional campaign structure and more deliberate management are essential. But, if you truly want to do something that stands out - you need to have taste. And - speaking broadly - most marketing leaders both lack taste AND have no idea how to develop it.
And part of that challenge is because you can’t optimize your way into style. You can’t spreadsheet + powerpoint your way into taste.
You have to build it like a brand: brick-by-brick, day-by-day, choice-by-choice. That’s something that most of us neither have the time or the inclination to do, but soon it will be all that matters. I’ve spent most of my first ~ decade in the workforce ignoring taste – after all, why would I spend time on something so amorphous, so seemingly unrelated to the thing I actually wanted (leads, money, sales, whatever). I’d eschew doing the tasteful thing – paying extra for the right paper, investing the extra time to co-create the perfect post, prioritizing “done” vs. “perfect – because that’s what I thought would get the transformative result.
In hindsight, the younger me was foolish.
What I did was optimize. I got to the top of the mountain I was on, and I scaled that mountain with a combination of ruthless efficiency and unshakeable pragmatism. Why spend the extra $1.00 per piece for the embossing if a simple print would do? Why obsess about the exact delivery of a line when we can just ship?
To some degree, I still err toward shipping – perfection is the enemy of the good. But as I’ve grown in my career and as I’ve been able to look back, I think about how I might have made those decisions differently knowing what I know now. And when I think about why I made those choices, it’s almost always this: taste is painful.
When I first started writing this newsletter, Aaron Orendorff (the same one from above) told me this: cut until it physically, viscerally hurts to cut another word. There should be no key that you use - and that you despise - as much as “delete.”
That’s what taste is all about.
It’s about making hard decisions. Cutting interesting, worthwhile sections because they’re not precisely aligned to the finished product you’re seeking to create. Scrutinizing every word, every phrase, every example until you reach that point where removing another syllable is not possible. Put another way: taste is about being willing to sacrifice the non-essential for the absolutely critical.
I genuinely believe that “taste” is what most brand teams strive to attain – they just go about it with rigid standards and sharp-looking style guides, when the reality is that taste is developed the same way a palette is: over the course of a 1,000+ tastings. 1,000 small decisions. An intentional effort to curate a point of view, then express that - and only that - in everything you do. That’s not something you can put into a process or a brand checklist; it’s something you just have to do. The mastery is the repetition.
We see it in fashion. We see it in art. We see it in cuisine. I wish we saw it more in marketing….because the absence of taste isn’t bad. It’s incoherence. It’s mundacity. It’s interchangeability.
It’s a paid social ad that looks exactly like the TV spot, which sounds exactly like the radio spot.
It’s the paid search headline that looks like it could have been written by any other competitor.
It’s the email campaign that tries (and fails) to clone a template lifted from a market leader.
It’s the branding/positioning/messaging that rotates like a Times Square billboard, instead of enduring.
Each one is a minor thing. Collectively, they’re everything.
Developing Taste
The great thing about taste is that (unlike Sidney Sweeney), developing it doesn’t require great genes (you knew I had to say something about that whole thing)....it just requires a willingness to develop your point of view, and an unrelenting desire to remain true to it.
Start with understanding who you are (or who your brand is). Write down - with bluntness and clarity - exactly what your brand (or agency, or you personally) is and what it is not. Who you’d never want to be your customer or see wearing your product.
Then layer on how that comes to life. You’ll be tempted to integrate vagaries and tone words – resist that urge. Instead, put all of your energy into specific, decision-driving statements:
- We make aspirational promises, never desperate ones
- Our humor is smart and sophisticated, never juvenile or goofy
- We show the product in use, never on a shelf
- We don’t sell energy drinks; we sell making the impossible reality
You should end up with a gauntlet that everything you want to publish/create/do must survive before going forward. That’s the goal – because that’s how you learn what should not exist.
Then, go back through your brand’s entire output from the last year. Ads, decks, emails, events. Lay them side by side. Would a stranger instantly know they came from the same brand? How many of them would pass the standards you’ve just created?
Build a swipe file of standards. Study campaigns you wish you’d made, or - better yet - read the copy from the OG advertisers (Ogilvy on Advertising, Hey Whipple, Squeeze This and Confessions of an Advertising Man are a wonderful place to start). I spend an inordinate amount of time each week just looking at the marketing other brands do – whether that’s Stripe’s motion graphics or HubSpot’s webinars or Hermes’ visuals - then annotating them with my own thoughts/ideas. I fully believe that exercise is what builds the “taste muscle” – it’s just like anything else. There’s no short cuts. There’s just the work of creating your own point of view.
From a practical standpoint, once you’ve defined your organization’s taste/point of view, the next step is to institute an “edit” where a taste-holder (a CMO, CEO, Founder, etc.) puts the final polish on everything. There’s a reason I’ve spent weeks pouring over every word of our new website’s copy until each one is just so. It’s the reason why the best art directors personally apply the finishing touches to a piece of collateral, until every pixel is precisely where it should be. It’s because sometimes, it’s those tiny details that matter the most. That’s not something I always understood, but looking back, it’s something I should have appreciated more.
This may sound crazy, but if you think back to the last fine dining experience you’ve had, you probably noticed something: the head chef wasn’t on the line; s/he was at the counter. And every dish that left the kitchen only did so when s/he was satisfied that it met his/her standards. That’s the same energy you want to keep with this edit.
After those things that pass the edit make it to publication, the job’s not done. You should seek out your creation in the wild. If you’ve read this newsletter for any length of time, you’ll know one of my “things” is obsessively reviewing your marketing. Clicking on your own ads. Going through your own post-click experiences. Reading every word of your post-purchase emails. Buying your own products, then actually using them. The only way you’ll be able to experience your product in the same way as your customers is to use them like your customers do. It’s not easy, but if it was easy, it wouldn’t be remarkable.
Taste is how you get to remarkable.
My favorite example of this obsession comes from Glossier. After they were hired, they made their new social team spend weeks answering customer emails. That’s countless hours they were not building strategies, creating posts or writing captions, but rather serving as wildly overpaid customer support. Any CFO would likely lose his/her mind, but the end result was something remarkable: social posts that sound like they were written by Glossier’s audience, not a social team.
And this is why taste wins in the end: not just because it helps you make better decisions (though it does do that); not just because it creates a coherent experience that will delight the people its supposed to (and repel those it is not); but because it becomes a moat that’s impossible for anyone (or anything) to precisely replicate.
We’re at the point where AI can generate 500 ad variants in 30 minutes (I did it today!) – but we’ll likely never be at the point where that same AI can tell you that only 1 of those 500 deserves to be published, because taste isn’t a pattern to be recognized; it’s a point of view that needs to be expressed. It’s the proverbial unbalanced equation in the Matrix that the Architect can’t fix - no matter how hard he tries.
When you can engineer that - you’re irreplaceable.
I’m not going to pretend I have this all figured out (I don’t) - but I do work on it every day. I say “no” more now than I ever have - not because I enjoy it, but because I understand the importance of it.
Curating taste starts as a lonely pursuit. It’s a miserable slog. But slowly, one tasteful decision after another, you build a critical mass that can’t be stopped or ignored.
This week’s issue was sponsored by Optmyzr.
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Taste is the Holy Grail of marketing. I think we should all channel our own, inner Indiana Jones just a little bit more and chase it. The rewards are most certainly worth it.
Until next week,
Sam
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