When making gets easier, choosing becomes the real work
If creating an image or adapting a campaign takes less effort, delivery volume alone can no longer justify an agency’s value. Taste and strategy matter more—but only when they become explicit choices that can be challenged and tied to an objective.
The promise of generative tools is straightforward: to make work accessible that previously required more time, technical skill and budget. Let’s treat those lower barriers as a working assumption, not proof that all production has become easy or interchangeable. The implication is still worth examining: when the ability to make things becomes less scarce, knowing what to make becomes more important.
A creative option is not necessarily the right idea
A small brand can explore several advertising concepts; an agency can adapt a direction without rebuilding every format from scratch. But an appealing image does not, on its own, explain which problem it solves. Another variation clarifies neither the audience, nor the promise, nor the reason to believe that promise.
The risk, then, is not just visual sameness. It is confusing the ease of getting a proposal with the relevance of that proposal. A business can have more content and still struggle to explain what it wants customers to associate with its brand. Abundance does not replace intent; it may even make it easier to put off defining that intent.
Taste is not a personal right of veto
In this context, defending taste does not mean treating a creative director’s intuition as unquestionable. Taste that serves a brand is a form of judgment: recognising what feels right, rejecting what blurs its identity, and spotting an unexpected expression without losing the meaning of the message.
For that judgment to have professional value, it needs to be explained. Why this image rather than another? What tension does it express? What does it make recognisable? What does it ask of the audience? “I like it” is no more sufficient than “the tool can do it.” Strategy provides the criteria; taste helps interpret them without turning creativity into a mechanical checklist.
Change the brief before multiplying the deliverables
For businesses, the response should not be to automatically commission more formats for the same budget. It should start with a more demanding brief. Before production, the business or customer relationship problem, the intended audience, the desired effect and the constraints all need to be clear. Otherwise, speeding things up mainly means speeding up indecision.
We advocate a process that keeps exploration open while grounding approvals in criteria agreed upfront:
- What the work should help people understand or feel.
- What must remain distinctive to the brand, whatever the format.
- The reasons for choosing one direction and dropping the others.
- How the outcome will be evaluated once the work is released.
Sell the decision without devaluing the execution
For agencies, this means making visible work that is sometimes buried in a single “creative” line item: framing the problem, researching, comparing, selecting and taking responsibility for the recommendation. Fees based solely on file counts or production time may fail to reflect that contribution. The work of reaching a decision needs to be discussed separately from the scope of production.
Execution does not become incidental. Precision, consistency across formats, rights and quality control still need attention. Our argument is narrower: when producing certain variations becomes easier, multiplying them is no longer a strong value proposition in itself. An agency must be able to defend what it recommends—and what it chooses not to produce.