Absolutely hideous.
Chilly Reception
Coke is cashing in on your nostalgia by remaking one of its best-known commercials with all new tech: generative AI.
‘Tis the season indeed. The Coca-Cola Company’s recently unveiled ad for the holidays is a twee callback to its 1995 ad “Holidays Are Coming,” which for many has been a staple of this time of year ever since it first aired.
We don’t recommend having emotional attachments to marketing ploys, but defiling the nearly thirty-year-old original with AI has upset many among the Coke-ad fandom.
“Why would you replace such a memorable ad with AI slop???” tweeted one user on X.
“Crazy that this is the company that literally made Santa red because of how iconic their adverts were, now they’re just making slop,” wrote another.
Jingle Hells
This is the company’s first fully AI-generated ad. The version of the commercial that Coke first shared — and is receiving all the negative attention — is only fifteen seconds long, but is instantly recognizable through its AI-generated recreation of the shots of Coca-Cola trucks driving across snowy landscapes, along with the re-used song. A full-length version was revealed in the trade public Adweek on Friday.
Both look very AI-generated. Faces are uncanny, shots are noticeably short, and everything looks like an even kitschier version of a Thomas Kinkade painting put through a cheap HDR filter.
In short, it’s ugly, and about everything we’ve come to expect from video-generating AI models.
Go Broke
Coke ads are a big deal, a cultural status that Coca-Cola spends billions of dollars a year to maintain. As such, you might take it as a bad sign that one of the world’s biggest advertisers is snubbing human creatives in favor of AI.
According to Coca-Cola’s European chief marketing officer Javier Meza, one of the reasons it used a machine learning model was because it was “efficient,” saving both time and money.
But he also tried to spin using the tech as some artistic choice to bring the classic ad in tune with “today’s times.”
“We didn’t start by saying: ‘OK, we need to do this with AI,'” Meza told Marketing Week. “The brief was, we want to bring Holidays Are Coming into the present and then we explored AI as a solution to that.”
If Coke’s endgame was to get rage engagement, it worked. But as for fostering holiday spirit and good cheer, some might start turning to another soda for that.
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