Why 'Taste' is The Modern Marketer's Edge: With Edelman Social Lead, Hannah Hickman

Feeds are drowning in AI-generated sameness. Campaigns, posts, and ads that once took weeks now ship in minutes, and consumers are swiping past content where every brand sounds like a slightly remixed version of the last one. The marketers pulling ahead are the ones with the taste to know which of the algorithm's outputs is actually worth publishing.

Hannah Hickman is Senior Vice President of Social Strategy at Edelman, the world's largest public relations firm. She joined after six years at cultural consultancy sparks & honey, where she led the youth culture practice with a focus on Gen Z and Gen Alpha. With over a decade in trend forecasting and digital marketing, Hickman approaches AI as a force reshaping how marketers train, pay attention, and decide what to put into the world.

"AI is incredibly good at getting us to 80% of an idea more efficiently. But that 20% is really critical, because that last mile is when you go from good enough to standout marketing," says Hickman. That last mile sits at the center of a bigger question agency leaders are working through. Junior marketers used to build cultural judgment through the very production work AI now handles, and the skill has to develop somewhere else.

Fruit slop forensics

At Edelman, that work runs through a global trend-mining practice. Teams meet weekly to share what is dominating their individual feeds and double-click on why a viral audio or dance challenge is breaking through right now. When marketers spend their entire day inside platforms, the feed becomes the world, and algorithms reinforce patterns by surfacing only what their engagement signals reward. Stepping outside that loop and accounting for a diversity of perspectives becomes the real work of cultural fluency, which Edelman treats as a muscle that strengthens through consistent practice.

The sessions also read memes and niche internet behaviors as cultural artifacts worth interpreting, which fits a year when "slop" tops Merriam-Webster's 2025 list and underscores how unavoidable the genre has become in everyday scrolling. "Once you push people to think about the most absurd or random brain-rot trend that's happening, the AI fruit slop that we're seeing, all of it has meaning. When we think about what they're informed by and what they're reflecting about humor or consumer anxiety, you get really interesting insights," Hickman says.

The attention that earns trust

With AI flattening the cost of scanning culture, pure speed and breadth lose their edge as differentiators. Any team can pull a wide map of trends across audiences and platforms in a fraction of the time it once took. "Especially with the advances in AI, it's never been easier to get a broad picture of a lot of different types of culture. But understanding the broad picture and being able to swim in the waters of culture are two slightly different things," Hickman adds.

The competitive advantage now lives in prioritization. Brand culture, target consumer culture, and product category culture overlap unevenly, and the marketer's value comes from picking the one piece in a thousand that drives reputation, trust, and credibility for a brand. That same discernment carries into how marketers think about attention itself, since AI has dropped the barrier to entry for content creation to zero, and audiences are facing record volumes of competing messaging.

"You might be able to gain attention or stop someone from scrolling past your content because you've got a really good hook or you're using the celebrity of the moment. But we always encourage clients to also think about what type of attention drives someone to want to believe your message and share your message. That type of attention requires a little bit more trust. Trust in the brand, trust in the message, and trust in the product," Hickman says.

Both forms of attention have a place. Cultural relevance plays and credibility-building plays work in tandem inside modern brand strategy. Marketers need to know at any given moment which kind of attention a piece of content is built to capture, then measure the impact against the goal it serves. With trust now rivaling price and quality in consumer purchase decisions, the stakes on getting that mix right keep climbing.

Volume meets vetting

The pressure to keep up with the pace AI enables is reshaping how marketing teams think about output. More content can ship, faster, but more content does not automatically mean better outcomes for a brand. The question becomes which messages deserve the time and which ones are filling space because filling space is now cheap.

"AI can generate a lot of content and ideas, and we should absolutely be using it to get us to that 80% quicker. But really understanding what consumers trust, what feels real to them, and what feels important to them is going to determine how we balance the volume of messages a brand needs to have in this media landscape with the right kind of messages to drive the outcomes they're looking for," Hickman says.

Executing that balance means rethinking the daily workflow. Marketers now spend serious time learning how to write better prompts, design custom GPTs, and curate training data, and the same rigor needs to live on the output side. Teams ask the model what the goal is, what context matters, and what success looks like. The same questions are worth asking of any draft sitting in a review queue. Is this good enough, or can it be pushed further? Does it feel right for this brand?

The harder version of that discipline is knowing when to override the system. The trap is trusting a high-performance label on an AI output simply because data is backing it. "We're spending a lot of time trying to retrain people to really focus on that human judgment, on that curation, on knowing when to say no or say not right now, even when the AI is telling us this is a good idea or it's backed by such and such data," she explains.

That instinct separates real work from work slop, the polished-looking AI output that has clogged corporate inboxes this year and routinely costs more time in cleanup than it saves up front. For consumer-facing teams, the cost runs higher. Once a piece ships with the brand's name on it, no one in the audience cares how easy it was to make.

Curator in chief

The deeper change is how marketers think about their own value. The job is moving from making things to deciding which ideas are worth making and which drafts are worth shipping. "Viewing AI as an amplifier, not a decision-maker, is going to become really important as it gets more integrated into our everyday workflows. I'm constantly thinking about how we shift the value we provide from being creators to being more editors-in-chief of the insights and the content. That requires a bit of a mindset shift from generating outputs to generating perspective," Hickman says.

Curating which materials represent a brand sits at the core of that new role. The work starts upstream of drafting, with the call on what perspective a piece of content needs to carry. Without that call upstream, even fluent AI output ends up as variations on nothing in particular.

That shift shows up most clearly in the moment after a generated draft lands and looks usable. As the pipeline from concept to finished piece compresses, the natural pull is to publish because production is now effortless. Recognizing that ease and resisting it is where the next era of marketing taste gets defined. "Knowing when to say no or 'not yet' is going to become an increasingly important strategic advantage," she says.