Coca-Cola has released a new AI-generated Christmas campaign titled “Holidays Are Coming,” featuring animated critters to reimagine its classic holiday commercials. The company produced the ad with AI studios Silverside and Secret Level after backlash from 2024 efforts, aiming for faster and cheaper creation.
In 2024, Coca-Cola aired three AI-generated holiday commercials that included gliding wheels on the iconic Coke trucks and faces with uncanny appearances. These elements drew criticism from viewers and observers. The company proceeded with AI technology for its latest campaign, shifting away from realistic human characters to avoid previous issues. Instead, the ad populates scenes with animals such as polar bears, a panda, and a sloth. These critters engage in holiday activities around the Coke caravan, but their movements appear unnaturally flat, resembling sloppily animated two-dimensional images rather than properly rigged three-dimensional computer-generated models.
The visual style in the “Holidays Are Coming” commercial lacks consistency, transitioning between attempts at photorealism and a cartoonish aesthetic with exaggerated, bug-eyed features. This inconsistency contributes to an overall dated appearance when compared to advanced AI video generation tools available today. For instance, OpenAI’s Sora 2 and Google’s Veo 3 produce deepfake videos that achieve more convincing realism and fluid motion. In contrast, the Coca-Cola ad’s animation falls short of these standards, highlighting limitations in the current application of generative AI for commercial production.
One specific enhancement in the new campaign addresses a flaw from the prior year. The wheels on the iconic Coke trucks now rotate consistently as they travel over snow-covered roads, eliminating the static gliding effect seen in the 2024 commercials. This adjustment improves the realism of the vehicle’s motion within the festive setting.
Coca-Cola collaborated with AI studios Silverside and Secret Level for the project, the same partners involved in the 2024 holiday ads. The company declined to disclose the exact cost of the campaign. However, it reported that approximately 100 individuals participated in the production process. This number aligns with the workforce size used in the company’s earlier, non-AI holiday commercials, indicating a similar scale of human involvement despite the shift to AI tools.
Within the team, five AI specialists from Silverside handled key technical tasks. They prompted AI systems and refined more than 70,000 generated video clips to assemble the final advertisement. This extensive iteration process underscores the labor-intensive nature of curating AI outputs for polished commercial use.
The adoption of AI in advertising continues to expand across the industry. Google launched its first fully AI-generated commercial earlier this year. The company stated that consumers show little concern regarding whether advertisements employ AI in their creation. Coca-Cola maintains its commitment to AI integration in marketing efforts, even following setbacks in past projects. One such incident occurred in April 2024, when a commercial fabricated a nonexistent book attributed to author J. G. Ballard, leading to inaccuracies in the content.
Coca-Cola’s Chief Marketing Officer, Manolo Arroyo, described the benefits of the AI approach in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. He noted the reduced timeline and expenses compared to conventional methods. Arroyo explained, “Before, when we were doing the shooting and all the standard processes for a project, we would start a year in advance.” With the new process, production concluded in about one month, allowing for quicker delivery of the holiday campaign.
