Coca-Cola Doubles Down on AI Holiday Advertising Despite Creative Industry Backlash

Coca-Cola's new AI holiday ad is a sloppy eyesore

Coca-Cola is once again using generative AI to reimagine its classic Coke caravan holiday commercials, and in doing so, killing some of the festive joy you have for the brand. After receiving backlash for airing three AI-generated holiday commercials last year that featured gliding wheels and uncanny-looking faces, the company has doubled down with a new AI Christmas campaign that's more visually jarring than the first. The "Holidays Are Coming" commercial attempts to sidestep issues around generating realistic humans by instead featuring a cast of various critters. There's no consistent style, switching between attempted realism and a bug-eyed toony look, and the polar bears, panda, and sloth move unnaturally, like flat images that have been sloppily animated rather than rigged 3D models in CG. Compared to the convincing deepfake videos being generated by tools like OpenAI's Sora 2 or Google's Veo 3, the videos produced for this Coke ad feel extremely dated. The only notable improvement to my eyes is that the wheels on the iconic Coke trucks are actually consistently turning this year, rather than gliding statically over snow-covered roads. The Wall Street Journal reports that Coca-Cola teamed up with Silverside and Secret Level on its latest holiday campaign, two of the AI studios that previously worked on the 2024 Coke Christmas ads. Coca-Cola declined to comment on the cost of the new holiday campaign, according to The Wall Street Journal, but said that around 100 people were involved in the project -- a figure comparable to the company's older AI-free productions. That includes five "AI specialists" from Silverside who contributed by prompting and refining more than 70,000 AI video clips. This comes at a time when AI tools are rapidly improving to replace the manual work performed by creative professionals, raising concerns about future employment opportunities. Google has also introduced its first fully AI-generated commercial this year, saying that consumers don't really care if ads are created using the technology. And Coca-Cola is firmly embracing its use in advertising, despite issues in previous campaigns, including a commercial in April that made up a fake book by author J.G. Ballard. Those past blunders are seemingly worth the risk for Coca-Cola, with the company's Chief Marketing Officer, Manolo Arroyo, telling The Wall Street Journal that its latest holiday campaign was cheaper and speedier to produce compared to traditional production. "Before, when we were doing the shooting and all the standard processes for a project, we would start a year in advance," Arroyo told the publication. "Now, you can get it done in around a month."

Generative AI Is Here to Ruin Christmas

Despite the controversy surrounding its use of generative AI to create a trio of Christmas advertisements last year, Coca-Cola has once again returned to the world's driest well, churning out yet another terrible AI-generated advertisement. Coca-Cola's iconic annual Christmas advertising campaigns date back nearly a century, and are a mainstay of the holiday season for many. The company's 2020 Christmas ad was particularly well received at a time when people were reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic, and recreated the company's iconic 1995 ad featuring a Christmas-themed caravan of Coca-Cola trucks bringing holiday cheer to a wintry wonderland. However, 2024's AI-generated recreation of its iconic 1995 ad filled some with discomfort rather than Christmas cheer. The short 15-second version looks terrible, essentially making all of the existing, human-created ideas featured in prior Coca-Cola ads look worse and unnatural. The "people" in the ad are based on actual human actors, which does little to make them appear more natural. It is, frankly, a mess devoid of any of the humanity that makes Christmas actually mean anything. This year's version, which yet again recreates the classic Coca-Cola truck caravan charging through a winter landscape, is decidedly better from a technological standpoint, built on significantly improved generative AI video technology. 2025's advertisement is more realistic-looking, which arguably makes it all the more discomforting. As The Wall Street Journal reports, this new ad was made by two different AI studios, Silverside and Secret Level, both of which worked on 2024's campaign. This year's ad includes a wide variety of animals, some cartoonish and others realistic. For some reason, the ad features sloths, seals, and porcupines in addition to Coca-Cola's iconic polar bears and penguins. The classic trucks sometimes quickly carry their soda, and other times drive at a snail's pace down the middle of the road -- snails are one of few animals not jammed into the 60-second ad. From start to finish, the spot feels disjointed and chaotic, which is perhaps a relatable holiday vibe for many. Perhaps most disconcerting of all is the final splash screen, which plasters "Coca-Cola. Real Magic," in front of a very unreal Christmas scene. Coca-Cola refused to tell The Wall Street Journal how much the campaign cost, but the company's Chief Marketing Officer, Manolo Arroyo, noted that it cost less and was faster to produce than a non-AI commercial. Coca-Cola says it only needed five people to build this year's ad, so at least there's that. No need to worry about all those pesky directors, producers, artists, visual effects specialists, and actors doing work. For what it's worth, Coca-Cola measures its annual profits in billions of dollars. "The core of this, the engine of this, is human storytellers," Arroyo tells Wall Street Journal. Although the general public, somehow, didn't hate Coca-Cola's AI ad in 2024, the campaign did not sit well at all with creative professionals. Alex Hirsch, an artist who created the critically acclaimed television series, Gravity Falls, wrote last year in response to Coca-Cola's AI Christmas campaign that the Coca-Cola "is 'red' because it's made from the blood of out-of-work artists." It's a safe bet Hirsch won't feel any different about this year's ad, even if the trucks' wheels are actually spinning this time around. If companies can save money and time by assigning creative work to AI, you can bet your bottom dollar that they will. Although television commercials designed to sell soft drinks are not sacred, Coca-Cola's ads are arguably cultural touchstones for people and do, in fact, matter. That clearly won't protect them from the uninspired, artificial hand of AI, which may or may have all its fingers.

Coca-Cola Is Trying Another AI Holiday Ad. Executives Say This Time Is Different

Warner Bros. Keeps Taking a Beating That the Joker Would Be Proud Of For a few weeks last November, no villain loomed larger over Madison Avenue and social media that polices it than Coca-Cola. The company's "Holidays Are Coming" spot, an homage to a classic 1995 ad, featured the original's rhythmic anthem as trucks drove through various snowy landscapes. Only now the ad was filled with AI generated objects, animals and people -- a fact that did not go over well with creatives and many others on the Internet who nonetheless helped the ad rack up billions of impressions. "Coca-Cola is red because it's made from the blood of out-of-work artists," Hollywood writer decried Alex Hirsch, one of many such negative comments noting both the spot's labor ethics and its aesthetics. On Monday, Coke is trying once more, releasing a new generative AI holiday ad with the globe-trucking concept. Again, the company has hired the Los Angeles-based AI studio Secret Level to produce the spot. This time, though, the ad features just animals -- the only person seen is a Santa Claus at the very end, based on the company's original drawings. (Coca-Cola inaugurated the modern depiction of Santa.) The company believes enough has changed in a year, in both the tech and society, to evoke a different response. "Last year people criticized the craftsmanship. But this year the craftsmanship is ten times better," Pratik Thakar, global vice president and head of generative AI at Coca-Cola, tells The Hollywood Reporter. "There will be people who criticize - we cannot keep everyone 100% happy," he adds. "But if the majority of consumers see it in a positive way it's worth going forward." In a culture where Hollywood creators worry about an AI takeover while a video-watching citizenry braces itself for a wave of synthetic media from Sora 2 and others, an AI commercial at this level is no small thing. Coca-Cola is one of the world's most dominant brands and the holidays one of Madison Avenue's sacred human spaces. The unleashing of a spot by the former into the space of the latter could prove a litmus test for consumers' appetite for AI video while also, perhaps, serving as a tool further normalizing its consumption. The ad features the now-famous Coca-Cola trucks driving through different locales as animals from seals to pandas look on, suggesting a globetrotting trip. It ends as a truck door swings open and Santa appears. The image of the icon was generated exclusively by the archival paintings of Haddon Sundblom that the Coca-Cola company owns; the artist in the 1930s created the original Coke ads for The Saturday Evening Post that gave rise to our conception of the mythic St. Nicholas as a girthful bearded man in a red-and-white suit. While the current generation of AI videos can often take on a disorienting stylized quality, Coca-Cola sought to lean into the bug by choosing to portray the stylized characters of anthropomorphic animals, which they say they couldn't do before. "Last year it was difficult to get those expressions from animals so we had to use human faces. Now technology has evolved to where we can," Thakar says. The desired effect is that of a Madagascar or other modern CG animated movie that uses artists working from scratch instead of the approach here, of a model trained on thousands of earlier images. Jason Zada, Secret Level's founder and chief creative officer, says he hopes viewers cannot distinguish this spot from a traditional Hollywood animated movie. "The best compliment I get is when people say a video doesn't look like AI," he tells THR. The company used several Large Language Models to generate the creative. Two other versions of the "holidays are coming" ad were also made this year, an AI one with another studio, Silverside, and a traditionally-shot one without the stylized animals, for some Latin markets. AI is a perhaps unexpected focus for Coke, given the company's history of a kind of schmaltzy humanism in its marketing. In addition to the Sundblom Santa paintings, which also had the rosy-cheeked character holding a Coke bottle in the likes of Ladies Home Journal and The New Yorker, the company is famous for its 1971 ad of a panoply of people from different backgrounds standing atop a mountain singing "I'd Like To Buy The World a Coke." Thakar says Coca-Cola is going through a "major marketing transformation, a companywide transformation" with AI at the center of the effort. The company was indeed one of the first to use the tech in a major ad when in 2023 it released "Masterpiece," which brought the subjects of museum paintings to life catching and tossing Coke bottles, an ad that did not cause the backlash of last year's holiday spot. Zada believes social media gives a skewed impression of how some AI ads are going over. "The haters on the Internet are the loudest, he says. "A lot of the people complaining last year were from the creative industry who were just afraid -- afraid for their jobs, afraid for what it did. But I think the spot tested really well and average people really enjoyed it." Zada said labor fears were misplaced; while the Coke ad this year required fewer people to make it -- he estimated it at 20, compared to the at least 50 a one-minute ad of this complexity might typically entail -- such efficiencies he thinks means that more could be done in a short amount of time. Brands will allocate the same budgets, Zada believes, leading perhaps to smaller teams on a given ad but more creative overall. "You could do ten times as much at scale," he says. Whether Madison Avenue and Hollywood respond by doing more or just try to save money, however, remains to be seen. Coca-Cola's AI push can be seen as a way to increase its appeal among younger, more zeitgeist-y consumers as the company faces competition from boutique sodas and other upstart beverages. But it also, in the long run, could save the company some cash, trimming at least some dollars off its reported $5 billion advertising budget. Madison Avenue executives generally are bracing for a potential significant downsizing in budgets as AI is deployed in areas from creative to research. Thakar, who denies the company will spend less money on advertising overall in the AI age, says he's taking a long view of what the tech can do, backlash and all. "Last year we decided to go all in, and it worked out well for us," he said, noting that "consumer engagement was very high. Yes, some parts of the industry were not pleased we were using a 100% Generative AI film, but that's part and parcel of doing something pioneering. We understand that concern. But we need to keep moving forward and pushing the envelope." He said the company was open to using it for activations in other times of the year, even high-impact ones like March Madness. "The genie is out of the bottle," he says, "and you're not going to put it back in."