With A Straight Bat

Apple never led because it produced more advertisements than its competitors. Nike never became a cultural force because it ran a bigger content operation than the rest of its industry. Their marketing budgets were significant, yes. But that is not what made the work memorable.

What made it memorable was taste. Someone in the room knew what to make, who it was for, when to release it, and just as importantly, what to leave out. The discipline was editorial, not operational. And it was never about volume.

I keep coming back to this because there is a popular argument right now that AI is making marketing irrelevant. That the function is shrinking. That the CMO role is under threat because machines can produce content, generate creative, build campaigns, and optimise spend faster and cheaper than any human team ever could.

The people making this argument are observing something real. They are just naming it incorrectly.

What they are actually seeing is that production is no longer a moat. The ability to write copy, design an ad, build a landing page, produce a video at scale. All of that was once expensive and time consuming. AI has compressed it to near zero. So yes, if a marketing department existed primarily to produce things, that department is now exposed.

But Apple never competed on production. Nike never competed on volume. They competed on taste. And taste is the one thing AI has not commoditised.

When every company has access to the same AI tools, the output converges. The copy starts to sound the same. The design looks the same. The campaigns follow identical logic because they are optimised by the same models against the same signals. The feed fills with work that is competent, inoffensive, and entirely forgettable.

This is the environment where taste becomes strategy. Not taste as an aesthetic preference or a creative luxury, but taste as the discipline of knowing what your audience needs to hear before they know it themselves. The confidence to say no to things that test well but feel wrong. A sense of timing and tone and restraint that no model can replicate because it is not a pattern recognition problem. It is a judgement problem.

Consider what Apple understood decades ago that most marketing organisations are only now being forced to confront. The hard part was never making things. The hard part was choosing what to make. Every product they killed, every campaign they did not run, every feature they refused to add was an act of taste that defined the brand more powerfully than anything they actually shipped. Nike understood the same thing. The choice of which athlete to align with, which cultural moment to enter, which silence to hold. These were not creative decisions. They were strategic ones.

AI has made this truth unavoidable for everyone else. When production was difficult, a company with average taste but strong execution could outproduce its way to visibility. That path is closed. Everyone can produce now. The question has shifted entirely to what you choose to produce and why.

The irony is that AI has made taste more valuable, not less. And most organisations are responding by doing the opposite. They are using AI to produce more instead of using the time AI freed up to think more carefully about what deserves to exist.

This is not an argument against AI in marketing. AI should take over every piece of production it can. But what it frees the team for is the question most organisations have not answered honestly. If your people are no longer spending their days writing and designing and building, what are they doing with that time? If the answer is not developing sharper judgement about the market, then you have automated the easy problem and left the hard one untouched.

Marketing is not losing its place. Production is losing its monopoly on marketing’s time. What remains when the machinery is handled is the real work. The work that Apple and Nike never stopped doing, even when they had the budget to outproduce everyone.

The real work is “taste.”

Photo by Ibrahim-Can DURAN on https://www.pexels.com