The New Creative Ratio: Why Taste Outranks Craft

The way onto a creative team used to run through your hands. Could you draw, set type, shoot, cut or write a pithy headline? The portfolio came first. Everything else came second.

However, craft is only one element of good creative work. Speaking as someone who’s spent years running creative teams, the best creatives have taste. They can read a room, know when to cut their favorite idea, are curious about things far outside their discipline and can bring an initially skeptical client along. We relied on those skills every day. We hired for them too, but they were tiebreakers. Craft decided who made the cut. That dynamic has changed.

AI Has Changed the Math

When it comes to execution, AI is good and getting better with every major model release. It raises the floor: competent output is faster and easier to produce than it was even a year ago. It doesn’t move the ceiling, though. Great work still requires great craft, and there will always be a place on creative teams for people who excel at it.

The ratio is what changes. When one part of the work becomes easier to produce, the other parts become more valuable. More time is devoted to deciding what to make, judging the output that comes back from a prompt or an AI agent and aligning stakeholders on what good looks like. Those skills were always part of the job. Now they’re taking center stage.

The Skills Were Always There

Creative work has always demanded three skills:

1. Taste: Some of the most creative people at any agency aren’t on the creative team. They’re the fashion-obsessed strategists or cinephile engineers who’ve watched more film than most editors. To be sure, taste often comes from making things. But it also comes from years of close attention to a field you love. When AI handles more of the execution, that kind of discernment forges a direct path into the work.

2. Direction: My team builds AI agents that do creative work. The more an agent works like a real creative team member, the more directing it looks like leading a human creative team. You decide what each agent needs to know and what would distract it. You show it what good looks like. You set checkpoints: agree on the idea, review options, then move forward. And you say no. Agents will build all the way to the end and produce something polished. Knowing the difference between polished and finished, and being willing to throw the generated creative out, are the creative director’s skills. They matter more than they used to.

3. Communication: Creative work is cross-functional. The briefs we see now often put the CMO, the head of MarTech and the head of data in the same conversation because transformation can’t happen solely inside one function. Someone has to translate between those groups, keep the idea intact and keep the project moving. That’s organizational and emotional intelligence, and creative teams need more of it.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Creative technology is a creative function at Code and Theory. Our technologists report into creative. That sounds like an org chart detail, but it changes what people are accountable for. Their goal is the quality of the creative output, not a technology metric.

It also changes how ideas develop. Instead of the creative team landing a concept and handing it to engineering to figure out, a technologist sits next to the studio during ideation. They’ll say, “Here’s how we could scale this. Here’s how an agent could take on part of it.” The creatives respond, and the idea gets adjusted so it works at scale. The idea itself gets better, not just faster to produce.

Most of the team members wouldn’t have been on a creative team a few years ago. Technology and creative can collaborate well, but when they’re accountable for different things, there’s always negotiation. When they’re on the same team, chasing the same outcome, that negotiation becomes shared momentum.

What Leaders Have to Change

Adding new kinds of people isn’t enough on its own. The structure has to change with them, and that raises new questions for creative organizations:

• Hiring: If the portfolio no longer provides the whole picture, what are you screening for? How do you assess taste, direction or communication in someone whose background isn’t in craft?
• Reporting lines: Where does a creative technologist sit? If they report into technology, they’ll be measured on technological outcomes. If they report into creative, someone in creative has to know how to manage and grow them.
• Reviews: How do you evaluate someone whose main contribution is a better decision, a sharper edit or a connection between two teams, rather than a pile of finished assets?

These are fundamental shifts in how we build creative teams, and there will be knock-on effects. But here are two ways to start shifting the mindset. Look for the people outside your creative team who care most about the work. And review people on what they contribute to the work, not only on what they personally produce.

Peter Steiner is the Head of Creative Labs at Code and Theory.

Hear more from Peter Steiner at Adobe MAX on the panel “The Rise of the (New) Creative Technologist,” Wednesday, November 11, 2–2:45 PM ET.