Beautiful is not enough: why food advertising more than ever needs a point of view

A brand team walks into a kickoff meeting with twelve reference frames generated overnight in Midjourney. The chocolate looks expensive. The lighting is flattering. The crumb is dramatic. The frames are also more or less interchangeable with what their three closest competitors could make in the same evening, with the same prompts, on the same tool.

Two years ago a single piece of beautiful food imagery was a creative endpoint. Today it is a starting point that anyone in the building can reach. Beautiful is now the floor, not the ceiling. The brief used to be “we need to figure out what this looks like.” The brief now is “we have twelve options that all look fine. Which of them belongs to us, and how do we know?”

For food advertising, where the look has been moving toward sameness for a decade already, this question is what really matters.

The cost of globalised creativity

Once a tool is universally available and used the same way by everyone in the category, the work it produces converges. The chocolate looks like every other premium chocolate. The pour shot looks like every other pour shot. The kitchen scene looks like every other AI-generated kitchen scene, all of them mid-warm, mid-shallow-depth-of-field, all of them suspiciously empty of cultural specificity.

For food brands, the consequence is direct. If your work could have been generated by your competitor from the same prompt, then your brand was not in the work. You paid for execution but not for distinction.

Mustafa Suleyman, summing up the AI track at Cannes Lions this past summer, put it cleanly: “AI capabilities are going to be commodities. Creativity, grit, hustle, resilience, risk taking — these are the qualities that will make the difference.”

If AI capability is the commodity, then the director’s point of view is the differentiator.

The director’s role just expanded

When camera phones arrived, the conventional wisdom was that photographers were finished. Everyone had a camera in their pocket. Everyone could capture a moment. The professional camera was suddenly the rare exception, not the everyday tool.

What actually happened was more interesting. The bar for what counted as a professional photograph went up, because the floor moved up underneath it.

The same shift is happening to directors and art directors in advertising right now. AI tools have given every brand team, every producer, every account manager the ability to generate a passable visual reference. What used to be a director’s territory is now everyone’s territory, at least at the rough-cut level.

But that does not make the director redundant. It makes the director’s actual job visible. The director’s job was never to draw a picture. It is to translate a brand idea into something that an audience would feel — through story, framing, pacing, performance and gluing it together. The drawing was a delivery mechanism. AI changes the delivery mechanism. It does not change the underlying work. Which is about taste, judgment, and the willingness to sit with a result that is almost-right and ask what is missing.

The industry itself is split on what to do with all of this. The honest read is that this is not a question of yes or no. It is a question of who is holding the steering wheel.

Is the director steering the AI, or is the AI steering the director? If the second, you bought a render. If the first, you bought a film. It is only humans who are able to navigate nuanced cultural contexts and ethics and achieve genuine emotional resonance. These qualities are rooted in shared lived experience. Food, more than almost any other category in advertising, runs on lived experience.

AI does not relieve that pressure. It tightens it.

AI is a raw material. A good one. A versatile one. Increasingly an unavoidable one. But raw material is not the work. The work is what a director, a creative team, a brand, and a culture make of it.

Food advertising will not get less competitive in the next two years. It will get more crowded, faster, with more visually polished work coming from more places. Inside that, the brands that stand out will be the ones whose creative still has a point of view that could only have come from people who know this brand, this product, this audience, this culture.

Beautiful is the floor now. The ceiling is whatever the brand and its directors are willing to climb to.