“Brilliant. No notes.”
AI Gore
Coca-Cola drew criticism for rolling out an uninspired and lazily AI-generated holiday advertisement this year.
The ad is pretty much exactly the kind of insipid corporate sludge you’d expect from AI: predictable, unimaginative and vaguely uncanny.
Fortunately, Redditors took matters into their own hands, celebrating tooth-rotting soft drinks with a far more “unhinged” take on Coke’s concept.
The result harkens back to the glowy days of AI gore, when Will Smith glitchily “eating” a bowl of spaghetti went mega-viral, with unsettling mishmashes of morphing body appendages and explosions. At one point, a polar bear even yeets its offspring into an icy lake for no discernible reason.
“Brilliant,” one Redditor assessed. “No notes.”
Out of Touch
Coke contracted three separate AI studios for its cheap-looking ad, and it didn’t take long for netizens to call out the company for brazenly replacing human artists with bland AI.
“FUN FACT: Coca-Cola is ‘red’ because it’s made from the blood of out-of-work artists!” Alex Hirsch, the creator of the Disney TV show “Gravity Falls,” tweeted in a tongue-in-cheek post.
It’s only the latest in a string of companies relying on cheap generative AI for its ads. Earlier this year, the corporate husk of Toys “R” Us was flamed for a similar effort.
Perhaps it would’ve served Coke better to lean into the limitations of the tech. During this year’s Super Bowl half-time, after all, its sports drink brand Bodyarmor released a nausea-inducing generative AI ad in an attempt to make a point about offering its customers a “real” product.
At least, the ad passed the low bar of being somewhat entertaining to watch, which can’t be said of its latest cringe-inducing attempt.
“They should’ve made it more self-aware and comical, it would’ve had a better reception IMO,” one Redditor argued.
“Tough for the marketing department to make a self-aware ad when they are all out of touch in the first place,” another replied.
More on AI ads: Coke’s AI Commercial for the Holidays Has Us Wondering If We Live in a Fallen World
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