AI Commoditizes Content: Why Brands Must Compete on Taste, Not Volume

Something strange is happening in marketing, and most brands haven't caught up yet.

For nearly a decade, the formula was simple: make more content, reach more people, feed the algorithm. Then generative AI arrived and took that logic to its absolute limit. Now anyone can produce anything for almost nothing. The feed never empties.

But in flooding everything, AI accidentally made one thing rare. Not attention. Taste.

The metric that broke marketing

The problem isn't a shortage of content. It's a shortage of judgment about what's actually good.

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At a recent industry event in London, marketers from music, sports, and media spent an evening wrestling with a version of the same question. Popularity and quality have quietly come apart. The signals brands use to decide what works, views, shares, reach, have stopped telling them whether anything is actually resonating.

Sarah Story, the DJ and BBC Radio Friday night host, made this concrete. Labels, she said, keep getting influencers to push tracks that get big numbers but aren't necessarily great. Her fix is to ignore the numbers entirely. When a track arrives she asks one thing: "Is this a good record? Will I play this in a club? If I will, I'll go with it."

One quality filter, applied consistently. Volume has nothing to do with it.

What taste looks like in practice

Veo Sports, a sports tech startup, runs its TikTok with 17-year-olds. Not social media managers. Kids who understand what's good, not what's trending. The result: 26 million organic views.

The sharper example is what Veo did off-platform. It created the People's Puskás Award, a competition to find the best grassroots football goals captured on camera anywhere in the world. Last year's winner was a player in Cork, Ireland. The year before, a 16-year-old in the French fifth tier whose overhead kick landed him on national television.

The competition was almost beside the point. Veo went looking for quality where no one else was and the audience followed. "The best goal is happening every week all over the world," said Rob Scotland, head of brand at Veo.

That's taste-driven strategy in practice. Not a tone-of-voice document. A deliberate decision to look in places the algorithm hasn't reached yet.

The boardroom problem

Here's what makes this genuinely hard. Most organizations aren't built to protect the people whose job it is to make judgment calls.

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Nick Sargent, a former senior executive at Condé Nast, said it directly: "I wanted to make sure that journalists were in a protected position where they didn't have to worry about money or funds or costs."

Without that cover, the reputational risk of backing something before the algorithm validates it falls on the individual. Most organizations will quietly punish that risk if it doesn't immediately pay off. That's why taste is so hard to defend in a boardroom.

The smarter brands are trying to solve this structurally. Unilever has pushed significantly into creator partnerships. Gap hired its first-ever Chief Entertainment Officer. Netflix bakes cultural hooks into shows at the production stage, not as a marketing afterthought. JD Sports is rethinking stores as places where kids gather and feel part of something.

None of them are trying to buy their way into culture. They're trying to already be there.

The counter-signal hiding in plain sight

Vinyl sales are surging. Physical magazine sales are up 20%. Gen Z is shooting on point-and-click cameras. Substack is booming. People are buying paper tickets not to get in somewhere, but to remember they were there.

James Kirkham, the marketing consultant who organized the London event, put it plainly: "We spent a decade learning how to go viral. But the cleverest ones are now trying to see how they can look quiet. It's how they look legit."

Legit can't be manufactured at scale. It has to be earned, one good call at a time, in front of people who'll notice if you get it wrong.