You can’t buy taste. In fact, the more money people have, the more detached they become from the entire concept of taste, as many of the world’s billionaires, and its first trillionaire, have proved.
Thankfully, you can hire a professional to deploy their taste on your behalf. And, until AI can learn to distinguish true creativity from generic slop, human taste will be something marketers will be investing in.
In one of the more chilling predictions made this week, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said human-level AI will arrive by decade’s end. But he believes that taste is one of the traits that will continue to give humans the edge.
Unsurprisingly, taste has become the subject of keen scrutiny for the industry’s creative leaders. This week, David Kolbusz, Lynsey Atkin, Chaka Sobhani and Rick Brim engaged in a debate over the nature of taste at Campaign House. The conclusion? Taste is subjective.
Sobhani said: “People laughed at the Impressionists. They said punk was not music. They said graffiti wasn’t art, and every single time there were wrong. So whilst excellence exists, no one gets to permanently own the definition of what taste is.”
What everyone can agree on is that taste matters now more than ever. But does that mean the poor unfortunates with inherently rubbish taste are headed for the scrapheap?
Not so, in Rick Brim’s view. Bad taste is also good. “A little bit of bad taste is like a splash of paprika, we all need a bit of bad taste – it’s hearty, it’s healthy,” he said.
It’s also worth bearing in mind, in the world we’re currently living in, bad taste often has more mass appeal than good. As American satirist H. L. Mencken said: “No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”
Will the industry pass the taste test?
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Jane Austin is the founder and owner of Persuasion Communications.
