You Can't Automate Taste
The job isn't making things anymore. It's knowing which things to make.
Horizon Media cut 50 people in March. They called it a “skills optimization effort.” This is happening everywhere. R/GA. Ogilvy. Grey. Havas.
The roles getting cut are execution roles. The people who did banner resizes. Who formatted decks. Who produced the 47th version of a social asset. The roles that aren’t getting cut? The tastemakers.
Taste. Discernment. Judgment. The ability to look at fourteen AI-generated options and know which one deserves attention and which one belongs in the trash. Adweek ran a whole piece about how every creative needs to think like a creative director. The argument being that when there’s a machine that can produce endlessly, the only scarce resource is someone who knows when to stop it.
I agree. Clients can now ask AI for ideas. They’re not paying agencies for output. They’re paying for someone to tell them which output is actually good, actually worth their time. That’s the job. That’s actually always been the job, but used to be a little bit more buried (under more corporate jargon).
So what does this mean if you’re building a career in advertising right now?
It means your portfolio of banner ads doesn’t matter as much as your point of view. It means the person who spent their twenties in weird corners of the internet now has an advantage.
Taste isn’t a talent. It’s an accumulation. Every strange film you watched. Every designer whose work you studied without being assigned to. Every brand campaign you pulled apart just to understand why it worked. That stuff has compounded. And it compounded in a way that an LLM can’t replicate. Taste requires a body that has lived in the world. Formed opinions about the world.
The lame part is that taste is hard to prove in an interview. You can’t put it on a resume. You can’t link to it. But you can demonstrate it in how you talk about creative work. In what you reference. In what you reject. The creative directors I’ve worked with who had real taste never had to explain it. You could feel it in their confident “no.”
If you’re early in your career, start developing your “no.” Go look at work that’s getting awards and figure out what’s actually good versus what’s just making a lot of noise (or creating a lot of useless “buzz”). Go look at failed campaigns and figure out what they got wrong. Train your instincts. Your specific point of view.
Xx, Caitlin.
If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.
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