M+C Saatchi promoting Naz Kasim to a design leadership role is not about elevating aesthetics. It is about recognising that when AI makes infinite output trivially cheap, taste becomes the only defensible moat. As visual production flattens into sameness, brands need people who can make judgment calls, not people who can make more assets. Design is being repositioned as strategic infrastructure, not service department.
M+C Saatchi promoting a design lead, Nike betting its recovery on World Cup collaborations, and Disney treating esports as premium broadcast content all point to the same shift. When technology makes production infinite and cheap, brands need people and systems that can make judgment calls at scale.
The new scarce resource is not content or reach. It is curatorial authority: knowing what to make, what to show, and what it should look like when everything else looks the same.
For people who’d rather be early and wrong than late and safe.