Not long ago, a single banner ad could take a week to perfect.
There was a brief, a kickoff call, a first round of concepts, two rounds of revisions, and a final file that somehow still had a typo in the legal line.
Today I may get fifty versions of that banner before my coffee gets cold. Headlines, images, product shots, even a voiceover.
Most of it is fine. Some of it is pretty good.
And that's exactly the problem.
When anyone can make anything, the making stops being the hard part. What becomes rare, and valuable, is knowing which of those fifty versions is worth shipping.
Or, knowing that none of them are.
The Bottleneck Moved
For most of my career, the constraint in marketing was production. Ideas were cheap, but executing them was expensive. You needed designers, copywriters, photographers, editors, and budget.
That scarcity did something really useful, even if we complained about it. It forced us to choose. You couldn't make everything, so you had to decide what was worth making.
AI has quietly removed that constraint. The cost of producing a passable ad, blog post, product image, or social video has dropped close to zero.
But when supply explodes, value doesn't disappear. It moves. When everyone has access to the same tools, the same models, and the same prompts, the output starts to converge. Feeds fill up with content that's competent, polished, and completely interchangeable.
In this new world of infinite "good enough," the scarce resource is no longer the ability to make things. It's the ability to judge them.
The Work Was Always in the Choosing
I've spent decades in consumer electronics marketing, sitting through more creative reviews than I could count. TVs, routers, car audio. Agency pitches, in-house concepts, packaging rounds, launch campaigns.
Here's what I noticed long before AI showed up: the best work rarely came from the team that produced the most options. It came from the person in the room who could look at a wall of concepts and say, with conviction, "That one. Here's why. And let's cut everything else."
The hardest calls were never about whether something looked good. Plenty of things look good. They were about whether it felt like us. Whether it said one thing clearly instead of five things politely. Whether the customer or end user would actually care.
I remember the campaigns I did with Call of Duty at TCL. Call of Duty was one of the best-selling video games around and a natural way to appeal to gamers, but it wasn’t a slam dunk. Shooter games come with political baggage, and we could have easily steered clear of it. There were a million reasons not to use this content.
But the decision was instinctive, intuitive, and intentional. We wanted to be authentic to a community, and that meant using real Call of Duty IP over the generic, faked “gaming content” you’d see in so many ads from our competitors.
We were the TV for gamers, and we had to show it.
No amount of options would have made that call for us. It took knowing who we were and who we were talking to.
AI didn't create the need for that judgment. It just exposed how much of the job it always was.
What Taste Actually Is
"Taste" can sound fuzzy, even a little elitist. But I don't think of it as a gift some people and others don’t. I think of it as a set of skills you can see in the work.
Point of view. Knowing what you believe and what your brand stands for, so you can tell when something drifts away from it. A model can generate a thousand directions. It can't tell you which one is yours.
Editing. The courage to cut. Most work gets better when you remove the second message, the extra visual, the clever line that only you find clever.
Restraint. Knowing when not to make something at all. Sometimes the right answer to "we need content for this" is "no, we don't."
Knowing why. Being able to explain the choice, not just feel it. Taste you can't articulate is hard to share with a team, and hard to defend in a meeting.
None of these are about production. However, all of them become more valuable when production gets cheap.
Taste Is a Practice
If taste is the moat, the natural question is how do you build one? I don't have a formula, but here are a few habits that have helped me.
Consume outside your lane
Some of my favorite marketing lessons came from airlines, outdoor gear, and fashion houses — not consumer electronics. When everyone in your category uses the same tools, the ideas that stand out usually come from somewhere else.
Study what lasts
It's easy to chase what's trending this week. It's more useful to ask why certain campaigns are still talked about decades later. Patagonia telling people not to buy its jacket still lands because it was a real point of view, not a format.
Write down why
When something moves you, whether it's an ad, a product, a book, try to name exactly what worked. That habit turns a gut reaction into a skill you can repeat and teach.
Use AI as a sparring partner, not a substitute
Let it generate fifty options. Then do the part only you can do: decide. The tool widens the funnel. Your judgment is the filter at the end of it.
Make something with constraints
Give yourself one image, one line, one idea. Constraints were the old way we were forced to choose. Now we have to choose them on purpose.
The Moat
Every major shift in creative tools has followed the same pattern. Desktop publishing didn't make everyone a designer. Smartphone cameras didn't make everyone a photographer. They made design and photography more accessible, which made great design and great photography stand out even more.
AI will do the same thing to marketing. The tools will keep getting better, and they'll be available to everyone, including your competitors. That's exactly why they can't be your advantage.
Your advantage is the thing that can't be downloaded: a clear point of view, earned over years, and the discipline to apply it one decision at a time.
So, here's my question for you…
If you stripped away everything AI could make for you, what's left that's distinctly yours?
That's your moat. Protect it. Sharpen it.