The Taste Economy: Why Curators Will Win the Next Decade
A Taste Gap In AI Marketing - Part IV.
In Part 1, we diagnosed the crisis: your brand is dissolving. AI has multiplied output by 100x, but most marketers use it to produce more of the same mediocre content—faster and cheaper. The result? Every brand looks identical. Every campaign feels templated. Every piece of content is forgettable.
We introduced the taste gap: the chasm between analytics-driven volume and brand-building quality. And we showed you the five dimensions of taste—tension, restraint, craft, resonance, and signal—that separate memorable work from generic slop.
Read Part I. - The crisis in taste and why AI might make it worse.
In Part 2, we gave you the training regimen. You learned to see craft as a curator does. You built your aesthetic vocabulary. You created your reference collection—North Stars that represent excellence, and Not This examples that show what to avoid. You trained your eye over 90 days to recognize quality and articulate why it works.
Read Part II - How to train your taste using AI.
In Part 3, we showed you how to scale judgment across your organization. You can’t be the bottleneck reviewing everything. So we built the systems: principles over guidelines, clear veto power, shared reference libraries, feedback loops, and modular frameworks that maintain brand coherence even when AI lets you produce 100x more content.
Read Part III - Building a taste-driven organization.
Now comes Part 4: Why that work just made you incredibly valuable.
Because here’s what most marketers haven’t realized yet: We’re not in a content crisis. We’re in a curation crisis. AI didn’t just make production cheaper—it inverted the entire value chain. The bottleneck moved from “can we make this?” to “should we make this?”
This final part answers the questions we’ve been building toward:
Why are we shifting from a creator economy to a curator economy?
How did AI invert the scarcity model—making production abundant and judgment scarce?
Why is curation becoming the most valuable skill in marketing?
How do you position yourself and your organization to capture that value?
We’re going to show you what’s coming. And why the work you’ve done in Parts 1-3 puts you ahead of 99% of marketers who are still optimizing for volume.
But first, let’s look at an industry that’s already been through this exact transformation. Because this isn’t theoretical. We’ve seen this movie before.
