Having Good Taste Does Not Mean You Are Creative
We are living in the age of curation.
Every minute, millions of people carefully construct an identity through aesthetic selection. I listen to these artists. I wear these brands. I consume this media. I share these views. We collect, organize, and display our preferences as if the act of gathering high-taste artifacts were the same as having a point of view.
It isn’t.
Having good taste simply means you are an effective consumer. You know what is accepted, what looks cool, and what fits neatly into current cultural norms. But when you drill down into a hyper-curated identity and ask what that person actually feels or believes, you often find there is no central core. Their point of view is a collective, algorithmic echo chamber.
And a collective consensus is the absolute enemy of creativity.
Curation Is Safe. Creativity Is Friction.
The real line where curation stops and genuine creativity begins is when you stop consuming and start making.
In advertising and marketing today, we see the devastating consequences of confusing these two things. Feeds, campaigns, and social media channels are decimated by people rehashing and remixing existing trends. They reproduce what has already happened because it appears safe and "cool."
The danger of this default strategy is total homogenization: everything starts to look, sound, and feel exactly the same.
When you only consume what you already like, you operate in a safe zone with zero friction. But true creativity requires exposure to the edges reading things you disagree with, seeing things that irritate you, and stepping out into the real world without screens or headphones. Creativity is born from pressure and tension, not passive appreciation.
The Wheelie Bin Paradox: Making the Invisible Visible
Standard "good taste" tries to solve problems by applying a polished, accepted aesthetic template. Genuine creativity solves problems by understanding human behaviour and psychology.
A few years ago, I was asked to tackle a specific issue: residents in an affluent area had stopped paying their local council tax. The standard, high-taste approach might have been a sleek billboard campaign or a nicely formatted direct mailer appealing to civic duty.
Instead, we looked at human psychology. Shame is a powerful behavioural trait, but non-payment of tax is completely invisible to neighbours. How could we make the invisible visible?
Without saying a word or sending a single stern letter, we replaced the trash wheelie bins of the baddies household with bright, neon-yellow wheelie bins.
At first, people were intrigued: "Why did they get a cool, bright yellow bin? How do I get one?" But very quickly, the word got out: those bins meant you were three months in arrears on your council tax.
Instantly, the non-payment issue vanished. People rushed to pay their council tax to get their standard bins back.
That is creativity. It wasn't about making a piece of content that looked "cool." It was an unexpected, behavioural intervention that forced people to engage.
Why "Safe" Is Now the Highest-Risk Strategy
To make advertising or art that works, you have to create something where the audience has to fill in the blanks. When a viewer figures something out for themselves, they experience a slight cognitive reward. That reward is where connection happens.
The misconception among clients and young creatives is that creativity is about reproducing an aesthetic that has already been validated by the market. But in a saturated world, creating something completely on-trend is actually the most dangerous, high-risk thing you can do. You pay for production only to disappear into the noise.
Winning requires taking a stand and developing an independent perspective even if it means making things that people don't immediately understand, or even dislike. Breakthroughs are found in the failure of past attempts, not in the safety of curated consensus.
The Only Metric That Matters
Real creativity isn't measured by immediate consensus approval, vanity metrics, or instant ROI spikes.
The true test of creative work whether it is a campaign, a painting, a poem, or a song is whether it alters someone's inner landscape. When someone sees your work, does it change them, even slightly? Will they still carry the memory of that feeling four years down the line?
If you leave a lasting mark inside the viewer, you have succeeded.
Less Content, More Meaning
The last thing the world needs right now is more content. We are already drowning in feeds filled with slick, well-curated, algorithmic reproductions of what was cool yesterday.
What brands and culture need now are fewer, better things.
Stop collecting other people’s masterpieces. Step away from the screen, look at the real world, take a risk on an uncomfortable idea, and build a perspective that is entirely your own.
