Three ideas have been on our minds a lot lately: taste, experience and creativity. They came up again and again at SXSW London this year, but they've been building for a while and they keep showing up in the work we do with clients.

None of them are new. What's changed is everything around them. So we wanted to go a little deeper on each one and we asked three of our own to share what they really mean for the brands and cultures we work with.

1. Taste is becoming the thing that sets you apart

For a long time, the advantage went to whoever could move fastest, spend least or scale biggest. That's shifting. AI tools have handed everyone the same capabilities, the same shortcuts and, increasingly, the same outputs. When anyone can produce something competent in seconds, competency stops being enough.

What carries weight now is taste. Knowing what's worth making. Having a point of view brilliant enough to stop the scroll in a feed full of perfectly fine, slightly samey content. The most valuable skill becomes judgement – the ability to look at ten options and know which one is actually good, and which ones should never see the light of day.

It's the most human skill there is. And right now, it's the one everyone's scrambling for.

Creative Director, Marc Allott, said:

"For years, competitive advantage has come from having access to something others didn't. Better people, brighter minds. Better data, greater scale. AI is changing that. The advantage now comes from what you do with access. When everyone can generate competent work in seconds, value shifts from judgement to production. AI finds patterns. Creativity breaks them. Taste is what tells you which patterns are worth breaking."

2. The experience is the brand

Brands used to be built in big moments. An ad. A launch. A campaign everyone gathered around. Those moments still matter but the brands people trust and come back to now are now built elsewhere: in dozens of small, human interactions that make people feel something.

People want proximity and craft. When budgets are tight and attention is thin, an experience has to earn its place. And the thing that makes one work tends to be consistency. Every touchpoint pulling in the same direction, reinforcing the same feeling, until the whole thing adds up to something people remember.

There's a lovely paradox in there too: discipline creates freedom. When a brand really knows what it stands for and has the assets to match, it can flex, experiment and surprise people, precisely because the foundations are so solid.

Creative Director, Dani Batty, said:

"An experience isn’t just a ‘moment’. It’s the accumulation of moments. Every little touchpoint, every interaction. The loudest parts, and the silences in between that the audience don’t even realise are happening. That’s why we design experiences across the whole system for scale, not just for the highlight reel. We create for the shift, not for clout."

3. Creativity is a growth engine

Creativity has spent years being treated as the nice-to-have. The bit you add once the serious work is done. We think that's the wrong way round and a view that keeps coming up recently is that creativity sits at the heart of how a business grows and the organisations that thrive build it in rather than bolt it on.

The case for it is as commercial as it is romantic. The most creative companies tend to outperform the least creative on the numbers that boards care about. And as AI takes on more of the process and the production, the genuinely creative act – having the idea and knowing what's worth making – becomes the rarest and most valuable thing a business holds.

The hard part is structural. Creativity struggles when it lives in one department or gets wheeled in at the end. It needs to be woven into how the whole organisation thinks and works, which makes it a culture question as much as a creative one. That's the bit we find most interesting, and the bit most businesses find hardest.

Dani added:

“Creativity is not the nice-to-have. It’s not the bit you wheel in once strategy's "done." It’s your commercial differentiator. If you’re not seeing that, you’re getting left behind. Every business can brief well. Every business can execute. AI's coming for most of that, fast. What's left, what's actually rare, is having the idea (I’m not talking ChatGPT idea churn). Knowing what's worth making. Backing the thing that feels risky before round four of feedback rounds it down to safe. That takes bravery. And bravery doesn't run on vibes. It needs permission. It needs structure. It needs people who protect the risky idea instead of silencing it.”

So, there we have it. Taste, experience and creativity are as old as society itself. The ground beneath them has moved, though, and what they share is that each one comes down to something human. As more of the work gets automated, the things a machine can't do are becoming the most valuable things a business has in its arsenal.

Recognise any of this in your own organisation? Let's talk.