Coca-Cola’s new AI holiday ad is a sloppy eyesore

Coca-Cola is once again using generative AI to reimagine its classic Coke caravan holiday commercials, and in doing so, killing some of the festive joy you have for the brand. After receiving backlash for airing three AI-generated holiday commercials last year that featured gliding wheels and uncanny-looking faces, the company has doubled down with a new AI Christmas campaign that’s more visually jarring than the first.

The “Holidays Are Coming” commercial attempts to sidestep issues around generating realistic humans by instead featuring a cast of various critters. There’s no consistent style, switching between attempted realism and a bug-eyed toony look, and the polar bears, panda, and sloth move unnaturally, like flat images that have been sloppily animated rather than rigged 3D models in CG. Compared to the convincing deepfake videos being generated by tools like OpenAI’s Sora 2 or Google’s Veo 3, the videos produced for this Coke ad feel extremely dated.

The only notable improvement to my eyes is that the wheels on the iconic Coke trucks are actually consistently turning this year, rather than gliding statically over snow-covered roads. The Wall Street Journal reports that Coca-Cola teamed up with Silverside and Secret Level on its latest holiday campaign, two of the AI studios that previously worked on the 2024 Coke Christmas ads.

Coca-Cola declined to comment on the cost of the new holiday campaign, according to The Wall Street Journal, but said that around 100 people were involved in the project — a figure comparable to the company’s older AI-free productions. That includes five “AI specialists” from Silverside who contributed by prompting and refining more than 70,000 AI video clips.

This comes at a time when AI tools are rapidly improving to replace the manual work performed by creative professionals, raising concerns about future employment opportunities. Google has also introduced its first fully AI-generated commercial this year, saying that consumers don’t really care if ads are created using the technology. And Coca-Cola is firmly embracing its use in advertising, despite issues in previous campaigns, including a commercial in April that made up a fake book by author J.G. Ballard.

Those past blunders are seemingly worth the risk for Coca-Cola, with the company’s Chief Marketing Officer, Manolo Arroyo, telling The Wall Street Journal that its latest holiday campaign was cheaper and speedier to produce compared to traditional production. “Before, when we were doing the shooting and all the standard processes for a project, we would start a year in advance,” Arroyo told the publication. “Now, you can get it done in around a month.”