Taste Is About to Be the Most Valuable Thing in Marketing
AI can write a thousand ads before your coffee’s gone cold. For about a week that feels like a superpower. Then it sinks in that everyone else’s AI can do exactly the same thing, at the same speed, for the same nothing — and the superpower quietly becomes table stakes.
There’s a simple economic gravity underneath this. When something becomes free and infinite, its price falls toward zero. It has to. And output — copy, creative, variations, the sheer volume of marketing stuff — is now genuinely free and infinite. So the value of output is collapsing toward what it costs to make, which is approximately nothing. If your edge was that you could produce a lot, fast, that edge is evaporating as you read this.
Which raises the only interesting question left: what can’t be made free and infinite?
A few things, and they happen to be the things that were always the actual job. Deciding what you genuinely stand for. Building an offer so good that turning it down feels almost foolish. Knowing, out of the thousand things you could say, which single one is worth saying out loud. The machine is dazzling at producing options and useless at having a point of view. It has no taste. And taste is getting rarer by the day, precisely because everyone’s leaning on tools that don’t have any.
I learned this somewhere most marketers didn’t. Long before I touched a marketing budget, I was a curator — reading rooms, choosing what played next, trying to feel what a crowd needed a beat before they knew it themselves. There’s no formula for that. You feel it or you don’t, and you only get sharper by paying obsessive attention over years. I’m building a brand in the music world right now, on nights and weekends, and the most striking thing is how useless the AI is for the part that matters. It can generate a hundred logos and zero soul. The feel, the point of view, the thing that makes the right person stop and think “oh — these are my people,” is still stubbornly, entirely human.
That’s the part I’d bet on. Not because I’m romantic about human creativity, though I am, but because the math says so. When everyone holds identical tools and stands waist-deep in identical output, the only remaining axis of competition is judgment. The offer. The positioning. The taste to choose. The discipline to say one true thing instead of a hundred forgettable ones.
So the conventional wisdom — that AI is making marketing fundamentals obsolete — has it exactly backwards. The fundamentals didn’t survive the AI era as some quaint holdover. They became the whole of it. Everything AI is brilliant at is now the cheap, commoditized layer that no longer distinguishes anyone. Everything it’s hopeless at is suddenly the only thing that does.
If you’ve spent years quietly developing taste and judgment and a real point of view, and assumed it was the soft, unmeasurable part of the work — I think you’re about to find out it was the whole asset all along.
Baron Belalov is a fractional CMO working with growth-stage and established companies globally.