It’s hard to understand why a company valued at nearly 300 billion dollars needs to save about 100,000 dollars by commissioning a good Christmas ad from a reputable advertising agency. But, for reasons that escape us mortals, this is what they have decided to do again in 2025, betting on artificial intelligence. And the result is terrible.
Coca-Cola has once again used generative AI to reinvent its classic Christmas ads (those with the Coca-Cola truck and Santa Claus traveling the roads of the United States) and, in doing so, they have unintentionally killed the festive joy you felt for the brand.
After receiving criticism for airing three AI-generated Christmas ads last year featuring sliding wheels and unsettling faces, the company has doubled down with a new AI-based Christmas campaign that is even more visually shocking than the first.
An ad made with AI that looks like it’s from 2022
The announcement “Holidays Are Coming” tries to sidestep the issues of AI when it comes to creating realistic human beings, instead presenting a cast of various animals.
There is no coherent style, as it alternates between an attempt at realism and a cartoonish look with bulging eyes, and the polar bears, pandas, and sloths move unnaturally, like flat images that have been carelessly animated.
Compared to the compelling deepfake videos generated by tools like Sora 2 from OpenAI or Veo 3 from Google, the videos produced for this Coca-Cola advertisement seem extremely outdated.
The only notable improvement is that the wheels of the iconic Coca-Cola trucks spin continuously this year, instead of sliding statically over snow-covered roads. The Wall Street Journal reports that Coca-Cola has partnered with Silverside and Secret Level for its latest holiday campaign, two of the AI studios that already worked on Coca-Cola’s 2024 holiday ads.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Coca-Cola has refused to comment on the cost of the new Christmas campaign, but has stated that around 100 people have participated in the project, a figure comparable to that of the company’s old productions without AI. Among them are five “AI specialists” from Silverside who contributed by generating and refining over 70,000 AI video clips.
The future they want is of AI, despite its poor audiovisual quality
This comes at a time when AI tools are rapidly improving to replace the manual work done by creative professionals, raising concerns about job opportunities in the future.
Google has also presented this year its first advertisement generated entirely by AI, stating that consumers really don’t care if the ads are created using this technology.
And Coca-Cola is firmly betting on its use in advertising, as explained in The Verge, despite the issues in previous campaigns, such as an April ad that invented a fake book by author J.G. Ballard.
Those past mistakes seem worth it for Coca-Cola, as the company’s marketing director, Manolo Arroyo, told The Wall Street Journal that their latest Christmas campaign was cheaper and faster to produce compared to traditional production.
“Before, when we were doing the shooting and all the standard processes of a project, we would start a year in advance,” Arroyo explained to the publication. “Now, it can be done in about a month.” And he says it with pride, as if doing it in less time is worth it, despite producing an infinitely worse and less memorable product.
