Coca-Cola has released another AI-generated holiday advert, and the reception is proving just as frosty as last year’s controversial attempt. The beverage giant’s newest festive ad campaign doubles down on the use of artificial intelligence despite across-the-board criticism of its 2024 AI-produced ads featuring some pretty unsettling visual glitches, such as wheels that seemed to glide across roads without turning and distorted human faces.
The new “Holidays Are Coming” ad attempts to mix things up, eschewing humans for animals presumably to avoid last year’s uncanny valley problem. But the result has been even more vitriolic responses from both viewers and ad professionals alike.
The ad features a variety of creatures, from polar bears and pandas to sloths, but their movements feel very stiff and fake, like flat images that have been awkwardly animated rather than correctly rigged 3D models.
Perhaps most jarring is the inconsistent visual style throughout the commercial. The ad jumps between attempted photorealism and a cartoonish, bug-eyed aesthetic with what appears to be no guiding creative vision to tie it together.
Critics have noted that compared to the impressive deepfake capabilities of cutting-edge AI video tools like OpenAI’s Sora 2 or Google’s Veo 3, Coca-Cola’s commercial looks surprisingly outdated and amateurish.
And what is the one notable improvement? The wheels of the iconic Coke truck actually turn this time around, instead of sliding across snowy landscapes like hover objects. That’s a pretty low bar, considering how flawed last year’s production was.
What does the new ad process of Coca-Cola mean for creative professionals?
According to The Wall Street Journal, Coca-Cola collaborated with Silverside and Secret Level on this, the same AI studios responsible for the 2024 holiday ads. Around 100 people were said to work on this project, a similar size as in traditional, non-AI productions of the company.
However, the workflow was dramatically different: five AI specialists from Silverside worked on prompting and refining more than 70,000 AI-generated video clips for the final commercial.
While Coca-Cola wouldn’t reveal the exact cost of the campaign, the beverage manufacturer is certainly betting on the efficiency advantages of AI. Chief Marketing Officer Manolo Arroyo told The Wall Street Journal that AI production is cheaper and much quicker than the traditional method. “Before, when we were doing the shooting and all the standard processes for a project, we would start a year in advance,” Arroyo said. “Now, you can get it done in around a month.”
All that speed and cost reduction comes at an awfully sensitive time. Across the advertising and entertainment industries, creative professionals are increasingly concerned about AI replacing human workers. The technology continues to improve quickly, which raises fears of job losses in fields ranging from animation and video production to graphic design.
Coca-Cola’s High-Profile Test Case for Quality and Consumer Trust
Coca-Cola isn’t the only company embracing AI advertising, despite the backlash. Very recently, Google released its first completely AI-generated ad and said publicly that consumers don’t particularly care if ads are created with artificial intelligence. That mirrors a wider industry embrace of AI, even as quality and ethical concerns remain.
That hasn’t stopped the company’s enthusiasm for AI, however. Apart from last year’s glitchy holiday commercial, Coca-Cola was criticized in April for an ad that created a fake book for author J.G. Ballard.
Such mistakes raise questions about quality control and factual accuracy when companies lean on AI systems capable of churning out convincing, if completely fabricated, content.
The math seems simple enough for Coca-Cola: the potential risks of AI-generated content are a fair trade for saving a lot of time and money. But this approach gambles with something less tangible yet arguably far more precious: the emotional connection consumers have with beloved holiday traditions.
The “Holidays Are Coming” campaign has been the linchpin of Coca-Cola’s festive marketing for decades, building a memorable association with Christmas celebrations. By replacing the craft of traditional production with demonstrably imperfect AI-generated content, the company risks eroding that hard-earned goodwill.
As AI technology continues to evolve and be further integrated into advertising production, Coca-Cola experiments represent a high-profile test case.
Whether consumers will eventually accept AI-generated holiday adverts-or whether loss of authenticity and visual quality will hurt brand perception-remains to be seen. For now, this year’s campaign reception strongly suggests that the technology still has quite a way to go in truly capturing holiday magic.
