👁️ The taste muscle

More articles are now created by AI than by humans. And it’s why the conversation about taste has been bubbling up everywhere lately.

But don’t worry, this isn’t another AI-focused newsletter. Because taste is, in fact, the oldest skill in the book.

You don’t need to look any further than the Golden Age of advertising. David Ogilvy spent three weeks reading about Rolls-Royce before writing a word, because his genius was in selecting the one fact that did all the heavy lifting. Bill Bernbach’s VW “Think Small” was 80% white space. His taste showed up in everything he removed. George Lois, who designed some iconic Esquire covers in the 1960s, had a test for every piece of work: does it make something happen, or is it just decoration? “Most advertising is background noise,” he said. “The big idea cuts through like a knife.”

These people were solving the same problem we’re solving now: how do you stand out when there’s too much noise? AI didn’t create the need for taste, though it definitely made the stakes impossible to ignore.

So what is taste, exactly?

Si Quan Ong wrote a great piece on the Ahrefs blog that nails three definitions I keep going back to:

Taste is applied judgment: the ability to consistently tell better from worse in your domain.
Taste is a coherent quality framework you’ve built through accumulated experience.
Taste is compressed experience: what remains after you’ve made thousands of editorial decisions and learned which ones held up.

All three are spot on. I’d add one more dimension that I think matters just as much. Taste is the ability to make the non-obvious correct decision — the one that doesn’t follow the template but serves the work better. Coloring outside the lines when you need to.

The good news is that taste isn’t a gift. You can build it deliberately.

Here are a few directions I really find helpful:

Comparing good and mediocre, side by side

Pull two pieces of content on the same topic, one that resonates and one that falls flat. Then try to articulate, in specific terms, what makes one better than the other.

This sounds simple, but the discipline is in the specificity. “This one is more engaging” doesn’t count. That’s a feeling, not an analysis. Push yourself further. Is it the opening that hooks you? The way the argument builds? Or that evidence is woven in versus dropped in as an afterthought?

The precision of your analysis matters more than the verdict.

This also works brilliantly as a team exercise. Consider making it a bi-weekly Friday afternoon session where you critique content together.

The goal isn’t editing a piece, but training everyone’s eye for what makes the difference, and building a shared standard that holds up when you’re not in the room.

Building your quality vocabulary

This one came from wine, but it applies to marketing beautifully.

When I started my wine expert certification, I couldn’t articulate much beyond “good” or “not good.” Then I learned the structured tasting matrix, and it gave me exactly what I needed. The vocabulary forced finer perception. Once I could name what I was noticing, I started noticing more.

When you build a vocabulary for what you’re actually evaluating, like hook strength, argument structure, voice distinctiveness, or insight originality, your judgment gets sharper.

This can also help when you need to defend a taste-based decision to stakeholders. It shows you’re not arguing from gut feeling, you’re pointing to specific criteria.

Reshaping failures

You’ll learn more from your three worst-performing pieces this quarter than from your best one. And you’ll learn way more from iterating on them than simply analyzing them.

I had a LinkedIn post a while back where I shared an idea I’d already tested in real conversations. I knew it was solid, but when I posted it, I just got crickets. Two months later, I tried the same idea with a different hook and a more relatable example woven in, and that version sparked immediate conversations.

Taste actually gets built in the rework, in the next attempt. Every reworked piece is a judgment call: what do I keep, what do I change, what was the real problem? Over time, those calls get faster and more reliable. That’s your taste developing in real time.

Reading outside your field

Rory Sutherland once said, “The best books to read on advertising aren’t about advertising.”

And while at the start of your career you need the fundamentals, later on, the ideas that get the strongest reactions are rarely the ones you’ll find by reading the same stuff as everyone else.

For me, the coolest cross-pollination comes from psychology, from behavioral economics, or even from a documentary I watched about a random ultramarathon in the US. Your curiosity is a competitive advantage, but only if you let it wander.

***

AI can produce content. It can mimic your style. But the judgment system that decides what’s worth making? That’s yours to build. It has always been important, and it’s important now more than ever.

Taste matters,

📝 New from the blog

Even if we’re already mid-February and the productivity hype has largely died down (together with all those forgotten New Year’s resolutions), I thought I’d share some notes on the philosophy and value of analog planning. This post covers key points of a great book called The Bullet Journal Method, along with my personal experience of using a bullet journal.

Read the post →

👌 Handpicked stories for you

Here are some interesting things I stumbled upon this week while reading, writing, researching, and being a generally curious marketing person on the internet:

💼 Three for work

Make Something Heavy | The internet rewards speed and volume, but stacking tweets and short posts will never add up to one meaningful piece of work. If you’ve been feeling the pressure to constantly produce content, this is a good nudge to step back and invest in something with real staying power.

Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Performance: A Lesson in Content Clarity | Bad Bunny’s halftime show is a great case study in what happens when you refuse to water down your content for mass appeal. The performance leaned fully into cultural specificity, and that clarity drove conversation, shares, and memes well beyond game night. A good reminder that content built for a specific audience almost always outperforms content that tries to please everyone.

How to Create a Social Media Content Series | This post walks you through why episodic content works, and how to plan your own. If you’ve been looking for a way to stand out against the flood of AI-generated posts, this format is worth considering. The examples are also pretty great!

👀 Two for fun

This look at graphic trends | It seems to me that the more digitally-focused we become, the more analog artifacts we crave in design. This exploration of the hottest trends seems to prove it.

This deep dive into theater and drama | I’ve gotten into the habit of watching cool educational content in my lunch break. This is an “old but gold” series for all theater aficionados like me. They have a series on anything from architecture to astrophysics.