Do not look like your category. Own your food and drink codes. Specialists win.

As a kid van Gerwen was obsessed with art, sketching, drawing and music, and that combination led him into audio visual studies and filmmaking. In the mid 1990s he found the ads phenomenal, beautiful little fairy tales told by brands, and that prettiness lured him in. He remembers famous Dutch directors making aesthetically phenomenal work for shampoos, a Shell ad with Naomi Campbell, and the Guinness horses, which he says changed the way he looked at advertising and made him want to direct ads.

There is a lot of amazing creative work at the festival, but what he most appreciates is the move towards long term brand building rather than creative sparks. He welcomes the long term campaign award, because much celebrated creative work does not actually change the business of the brands it serves. What interests him is the work that fundamentally changes brands over time, and he believes there is more love for that now than ever before.

Even with the rise of AI, van Gerwen argues, the way humans work does not fundamentally change. People still need awareness, positive associations and mental shortcuts for a brand to come to mind, and he does not much mind whether the channel is an LLM or an outdoor ad.

He believes performance has been over invested in, and that the balance is now moving. He credits System1, Ipsos and Kantar with disclosing knowledge about how brands grow that was once expensive and hidden. Now, he says, you can listen to 10 podcasts and know the fundamentals, which makes better informed decisions far easier for everyone.

Van Gerwen was a live action director who was moderately successful without ever feeling it was his field. When his wife Ellen started at a food photography company he saw a category that was always beautiful, that everyone liked, and that people would never stop buying. The couple founded their studio around 15 years ago, spent five years doing many things, then chose food and drink only. That, he says, is when life started to make sense.

As a generic filmmaker he could not explain what made him great, because plenty of people were better. As a food and drink specialist there are far fewer, and that clarity is what he now chases. He argues that specialists rule the world, and that being one makes your own salience and top of mind availability easier to build.

His aesthetic chases three dimensionality and dynamism, but what he cares about most is that the work is not generic, delicious food. If a pizza ad is mostly melting cheese and cutting onions, it creates appetite for the category, not the brand, which he calls a big flaw in the way he is briefed. Being delicious should be a hygiene factor, and the work should also be recognisable and meaningful to the brand.

He shoots almost every category, mostly quick service restaurants, beer, sodas and now pizza. The market is changing, with GLP-1 taking a toll on the types of food and the portioning he films, though the salty, fatty, sweet, delicious stuff still dominates because it is advertised the most.

A small group of people shoot all this work, each with their own trends, and brands that claim to be distinctive usually are not. Outside the packaging, van Gerwen says, you look suspiciously like your competitor, and beer positioning statements are remarkably similar, so the images inevitably converge. In these processes, he insists, the only one who should have a really strong opinion is the brand, otherwise the craftspeople take over and do what they do by reflex.

He has shot the same beer plunging into a glass a dozen times for rival brands, and the same stylist makes the same foam on rival sets. So a brand should know which foam is theirs. For seven years he has urged brands to codify how their food and drink should look, and each time they listen they wonder why they did not think of it earlier. He calls it a culinary identity, a sibling to a visual or sonic identity.

Van Gerwen splits his work into craft production for agencies, where he plays no strategic role, and culinary identity design, where the client must brief him on what the food should express. Brand building, he stresses, does not happen over half a year, and research suggests creative effects compound after four to five years. The Coca-Cola trucks are decades of consistency. Brands wrongly think each new season needs a new campaign, when they need the same campaign made to feel fresh, what Sarah Carter calls disguised repetition.

He is proudest of his Lipton Ice Tea work, where he designed a consumption ritual. Because the drink is perceived as a soda but is actually a tea, a sip is paired with a lifted pinky and the ting of a spoon against a cup, together the Lipting. It now appears in every ad as a brand signal hiding in every expression, and he hopes to measure in a few years that most consumers know the lifted pinky means the brand.

An identity, van Gerwen says, is how you are identifiable beyond your name: distinctive assets like the Coca-Cola Santa, the Burger King colours or the McDonald's arches. He cites System1 research that a 20 second or longer ad needs at least seven brand cues to more or less guarantee recognition, and warns that the answer is not seven logos but famous codes, from the Budweiser Clydesdales to Michael Jackson's glove.

The resource he credits most is the Mark Ritson Mini MBA, which gave him the language and standing to change his relationship with clients, so they trust that he understands their world. His advice to newcomers is to become a deep specialist, because it improves your work, your salience and your fame, and a one stop shop agency will always lose to someone who does one thing better.