When anyone can make anything, taste is the only edge
Production is close to free. The scarce skill now is deciding what not to make, and most marketing teams are built to do the opposite.
For most of advertising history, making things was the hard part. Crews, studios and print runs put a natural ceiling on how much a brand could put out. That ceiling is gone. A small team with today's tools can produce a year of content in a week. The thesis: when output is unlimited, the advantage moves entirely to selection. Taste is no longer a soft skill. It is the job, and it is mostly the discipline of saying no.
More output is not more effect
Marketing leaders are using the new capacity. In Gartner's 2025 CMO Spend Survey of 402 marketing leaders, 27% said generative AI was improving their capacity to produce more content, and 49% cited time efficiency. Budgets, meanwhile, stayed flat at 7.7% of company revenue.
So more content is chasing the same money and the same attention. The question is whether more of it works. The evidence says the opposite: markets reward very little of what gets made.
The market only pays the top quartile
McKinsey's Business Value of Design tracked 300 listed companies over five years, across medical technology, consumer goods and retail banking. Top quartile design performers grew revenue 32 percentage points faster than their industry peers and delivered 56 points higher shareholder returns. The striking part is what happened below them: the differences between the second, third and fourth quartiles were marginal.
McKinsey partner Ben Sheppard summed it up in the firm's own explainer: pick one project and do it properly, or do not do it at all, because customers need to recognise a company as the best out there before it gets the rewards. McKinsey's numbers show correlation, not cause, and better run companies may simply invest more in design. The shape still holds.
That shape changes the maths. If being good is barely rewarded and being best is rewarded heavily, then making more good work is a poor strategy. Making less work, better, is the only one that pays.
Dull is the default, and teams fund it
System1's research on dull advertising found neutral, no emotion, is the single biggest response to TV ads: 52% of responses in the UK and 47% in the US. In consumer categories, marketers at least put more money behind their most interesting work. In UK B2B the pattern flips. Over half of B2B TV spend, £53m of £103m, went to ads in the most dull quartile, and only £9m to the least dull.
That is not a production problem. Every one of those ads was made competently. It is a selection problem. Someone approved them, and someone else put money behind them.
AI makes taste harder, not easier
Generative tools widen the gap. In a Science Advances experiment by Anil Doshi and Oliver Hauser, stories written with AI ideas were rated more creative, but they were also more similar to each other than stories written alone. Feed the same tools to an entire category and the work drifts toward the same centre.
Kantar found something similar in ads: AI made work had weaker branding on average, mainly when the brand's own assets and tone were never put into it. The tool supplies options. Only taste supplies a point of view.
What taste looks like in practice
Fewer, bigger ideas. One strong platform, run for years, beats a calendar of disconnected posts. Each extra idea dilutes the memory a brand is trying to build.
A kill rate, not an output target. Teams count what they ship. The better metric is how much they killed to get there. Fifty routes to find one is now cheap, so there is no excuse for shipping the third best.
One person with the final call. Committees average. Every extra approver removes the part someone found risky, and the risky part is usually the part people would have remembered.
References from outside the category. If every input is a competitor's work, the output will look like the competitor's work. Taste is built from galleries, films, architecture and the street.
The new scarcity
The industry spent a century optimising for making things faster. That problem is solved. The brands that pull ahead now will be the ones that use the extra capacity to look at more options and ship fewer of them. When anyone can make anything, the only thing left to own is the judgment about what deserves to exist.
FAQ
Why does taste matter more now?
Because production is close to free. When everyone can make unlimited content, the advantage moves to choosing what to make and what to cut.
Does good design really affect revenue?
McKinsey tracked 300 companies for five years and found top quartile design performers grew revenue 32 percentage points faster than peers, while lower quartiles differed only marginally.
Is dull advertising common?
Very. System1 found neutral is the largest response to TV ads, 52% in the UK and 47% in the US, and in UK B2B over half of TV spend backed the dullest quartile.
How can a marketing team build taste?
Run fewer, bigger ideas for longer, track how much gets killed, give one person the final call, and draw references from outside the category.
Related reading and work
Cliff
Writes The Monthly Ramble on AI, creativity, brand and social.
