Future of Marketing Briefing: In the age of AI, taste is the new competitive advantage 

But somewhere in all that abundance, something inverted. The scarce thing stopped being attention. It became taste – the judgment to know what’s good, the authority to say so. 

The point was brought into sharp focus on Wednesday evening inside the Rio Cinema in Dalston – the kind of place that has survived every wave of east London’s reinvention precisely because it never tried to keep up with any of them. That, roughly, was the argument being made inside it. Across three panels drawing on music, sports and magazine culture, the same argument kept resurfacing: in a world where the tools are everywhere and the output is indistinguishable, taste is the last thing that actually compounds. 

“Rather than trying to interrupt what people are interested in, become what they’re interested in,” said James Kirkham, the marketing consultant, who turned his Inked in & Iconic newsletter into a live event for the first time.

The problem, as the evening made clear, is that most brands have no idea what people are actually interested in because they’re using the wrong signal. Popularity and quality have become dangerously decoupled, and the metrics layer is actively making it worse. Nowhere was that more visible than in music.

“A lot of labels are getting influencers to push tracks and it’s blown up and it’s not necessarily great,” said Sarah Story, the DJ and label boss whose Friday night BBC Radio show has made her one of the U.K’s most trusted taste-makers. 

The result, she continued, is a culture where attention and quality have quietly stopped meaning the same thing. Her response is deliberately ignoring the numbers entirely. When music comes in, whether it’s from SoundCloud, TikTok or even a USB ticket pressed into her hands mid set, she applies a single filter. “Is this a good record? Will I play this in a club? If I will, I’ll go with it”. 

It’s why so many brands put a premium on marketers who understand meme culture – the lingua franca of the internet. Take Veo, the sports tech startup. It runs its TikTok operation with 17-year-olds, and gets 26 million organic views to show for it. But the sharper example is the People’s Puskás Award – a competition created to celebrate the best grassroots football goals captured on camera worldwide. The winner last year was a player in Cork, Ireland. The one before that was a 16-year-old in the French fifth tier whose overheard kick landed him on national television. The competition was almost incidental. 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

It sounds simple: trust your instinct, look to the fringes, back the thing that hasn’t broken yet. For marketers, it’s anything but. Their discipline sits as close to art as any science gets, yet it has long been treated as an engineering problem – one that has been codified and systematized so much of the risk and alchemy that built the world’s biggest brands and cultural movements. Going against that industrial logic is daunting, precisely because when it goes wrong it’s on you. But that reputational skin in the game is exactly what gives taste its value.  

The media execs on another panel knew that better than anyone. As Nick Sargent, who has held multiple positions at Condé Nast, including chief business officer for CULTURE and publishing director for the GQ Portfolio, put it: “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.” 

Taste, in other words, requires institutional cover. Without it, the reputational risk lands on the individual – and most organizations aren’t built to absorb that. Granted, the smarter ones are starting to figure it out. Unilever’s push into the creator economy. Gap hired its first ever chief entertainment officer. Netflix bakes viral hooks into its shows from the ground up. JD Sports is rethinking its stores not as retail space but as places where kids can show up, compare products and feel part of something. None of them are trying to buy their way into culture. They’re trying to already be there. 

Like many marketers, former NME editor Conor McNicholas learnt that the hard way. 

“The brand function [of NME] was to connect culture-hungry young music fans with inspiring music,” he said. “That’s what you do.”

When digital arrived and the magazine became the least effective vehicle for doing that, the NME moved into TV, radio and social. The format changed. The mission – ideally, at least – didn’t. That’s precisely the thing most brands, chasing the next algorithmic shift, get exactly backwards.

“I think brands today are being built to sell,” said Charlotte Mair, founder of cultural communications agency The Fitting Room. “Previously they were built to add value, to give a service, to play a part in society. That depth has been completely lost.”

And yet that depth is exactly what people are hunting for. Vinyl sales are surging. Physical magazine sales are up 20%. Running clubs have replaced superclubs. Gen Z is shooting on point-and-click cameras — drawn, as Kirkham put it, to “the friction and the difficulty.” Substack is booming. People are buying paper tickets not to get in, but to remember they were there. Even among 12-year-olds, the instinct is analog. 

When I was a kid everyone wanted to be a DJ, then the generation after wanted to be a producer using Fruity Loop on the Playstation Two, but now everyone’s got their own streetwear label, said music producer Tunde Babaoloa, of his son’s peer group. “It’s like 200 kids hanging around every Saturday, talking, sharing ideas.” 

The medium is new. The impulse is ancient. And it’s precisely that impulse – the instinct to seek out culture, to find connection through it before anyone tells you what to like – that Sarah Boorman, Universal Music Group’s GM of youth strategies, worries the industry is sleepwalking into destroying. Her distinction is simple and damning: with 100,000 tracks uploaded to Spotify every week, the industry has convinced itself the problem is silver. For the generation coming up, it’s barely begun. 

“We all have this illusion that music is everywhere. But if you’re a child, your access is limited by so many things,” said Borman.

Which is to say availability is not the same as experience. And experience – real, felt and, most importantly, remembered – is the only thing that actually builds the kind of relationship between people and culture that brands have spent a decade trying to replicate with targeting tools and optimization budgets.  

Charlie Copsey, the founder of experience company Underground Fan Club, has built a business on creating exactly those conditions. Her measure of success isn’t reach, it’s whether someone leaves feeling something they didn’t expect. After a recent dinner for 20 women runners one attendee messaged her afterwards:”I’ve never walked into a room and felt so included in my life,” recounted Copsey.

Brands, she argued, consistently squandered that by treating talent like a commodity. It’s a frustration I’ve lost count of hearing. Spend enough time talking to marketers and the same story keeps coming back: the instinct is there, the case is obvious, but getting it signed off is another matter entirely.

Taste, it turns out, is hard to defend in a boardroom. 

“When you work with the right person, they love what you’re doing as much as the fans,’ Copsey added.  

Kirkham’s closing line was the plainest summary of where things stand: “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.”

Because 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.

OpenAI’s ads team is already expanding

OpenAI’s ads boss David Dugan only joined last month, and he’s already building out what is officially called the Global Ads Solutions team.

In the San Francisco office, Whitney Muldowney has joined from Pinterest, where she spent the past four years across enterprise sales for its travel vertical. And while Christin Klein originally joined OpenAI’s Go-to-Market team in March 2025 from Snap after an eight-year stint (where she was most recently the U.S. head of its tech and gaming verticals), but moved over to the Global Ads Solutions team in January.

Then there’s Kayla Reinherz, who now leads OpenAI’s Ads Data Science team, after spending nine years at Meta in a similar role – who will likely be the boss of the advertising marketing science leader Digiday reported about on Tuesday. 

And this is just the start.

Currently, the ChatGPT ads pilot is available in the U.S. and OpenAI’s Asad Awan confirmed last month that it will expand to Canada, Australia and New Zealand “in the coming weeks”. But according to its jobs board, the company is already looking for a regional client partner and customer success manager in London and Tokyo. So it likely won’t be too long before we see ads in the U.K. and Japan.

London especially makes sense, as OpenAI has just announced its first permanent London office in King’s Cross will open in 2027, expanding the presence it has had there since 2023, with the intention of making the city its largest research hub outside the U.S. — Krystal Scanlon

Numbers to know

78%: Percentages of marketers that said they need more personalized content than they can produce. 

$3 billion: Total ad revenue that Netflix expects to make this year.

$75 million: Amount that Robinhood Ventures Fund I has invested in OpenAI

$1 trillion: The amount Anthropic has been valued at, meaning it has already surpassed OpenAI

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YouTube is turning audio into an ad product — SiriusXM is selling it

YouTube is packaging its growing “audio-first” listening (podcasts, music, background play) into a formal ad product, and has tapped SiriusXM to sell it.

OpenAI turns on cost-per-click ads inside ChatGPT

OpenAI has switched on cost-per-click ads inside ChatGPT, moving from impression-based pricing to a model similar to search advertising. The shift is a step toward making ChatGPT a performance ad channel, allowing advertisers to measure and compare results more directly.

NHL looks to TikTok to capitalize on Heated Rivalry and Olympics as it grows beyond U.S. and Canada

The NHL is leaning into TikTok to turn a surge of interest from the Olympics and pop culture moments into long-term global fan growth. By building a strong social presence, it hopes to convert casual viewers into committed fans and boost the value of its media rights internationally.

What we’re reading

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OpenAI and Anthropic are starting to move away from specialised “reasoning” techniques as newer models get better at handling complex tasks on their own. Instead, they’re focusing more on improving core training and data to boost overall model performance, per The Information.

Meta’s AI pixel and the vanishing ad-product divide

Meta’s AI push is blurring the line between ads and product, with automation handling more of the optimisation. The result: ads are becoming part of the product itself, not a separate system, per Mobile Dev Demo.

ChatGPT Ads Have Begun Showing Up For Logged-Out Users

ChatGPT ads are now starting to appear for logged-out users, expanding inventory as OpenAI looks to meet advertiser demand, according to AdExchanger.

Inside Microsoft’s wave of executive departures

Microsoft is facing a wave of executive departures, prompting internal reshuffles. The exits come as the company navigates pressure tied to its AI push and broader strategy shifts, per The Verge.