Coca-Cola’s Holiday Ads Trade the ‘Real Thing’ for Generative AI

Alex Vadukul

With temperatures dropping, nights growing longer and decorations starting to appear in store windows, the holidays are on their way. One of the season’s stalwarts, however, is feeling a little less cozy for some people: Coca-Cola, known for its nostalgia-filled holiday commercials, is facing backlash for creating this year’s ads with generative artificial intelligence.

The three commercials, which pay tribute to the company’s beloved “Holidays Are Coming” campaign from 1995, feature cherry-red Coca-Cola trucks driving through sleepy towns on snowy roads at night. The ads depict squirrels and rabbits peeking out to watch the passing caravans and a man being handed an ice-cold bottle of cola by Santa Claus. “’Tis the season,” a jingle chirps. “It’s always the real thing.” The tagline, pushing Coke’s “real thing” slogan, is juxtaposed with a disclaimer: “Created by Real Magic AI.”

The internet pile-on arrived swiftly as consumers decried the commercials as uncanny valley-esque perversions of the company’s classic ads. “Coca-Cola just put out an ad and ruined Christmas,” Dylan Pearce, one of the campaign’s many critics, said on TikTok, adding, “To put out slop like this just ruins the Christmas spirit.”

“This is legit heartbreaking,” another user, De’Vion Hinton, posted on the social platform X. “Coca Cola has been the gold standard in branding and advertising for decades.” Alex Hirsch, an animator and the creator of the Disney series “Gravity Falls,” expressed a sentiment that other creative professionals have shared online: that the brand’s signature red represented the “blood of out-of-work artists.” The company, however, is sticking by the ads.

“The Coca-Cola Co. has celebrated a long history of capturing the magic of the holidays in content, film, events and retail activations for decades around the globe,” a company spokesperson said in a statement provided to The New York Times. “This year, we crafted films through a collaboration of human storytellers and the power of generative AI.

“Coca-Cola will always remain dedicated to creating the highest level of work at the intersection of human creativity and technology,” the statement added.

Pratik Thakar, a vice president of Coca-Cola and the company’s global head of generative AI, discussed the project in a recent interview with Ad Age, which previewed a screening of one of the spots at its Emerging Tech Summit last week. He cited the budgetary advantages of the project along with the speed at which the work could be created.

“We keep our roots in our heritage and what Coke is all about as a brand but then connect the dots with the future and technology,” Thakar told Ad Age. “And that was kind of a starting point.”

“AI is always good at creating fantastical, hyperrealistic stories, and that’s where the whole imagination went into next level,” he added in a follow-up story about the consumer reaction. “If I want to go very realistic, maybe it’s difficult, but if I want to go hyperrealistic and fantastical, AI is actually a much better tool.”

Coca-Cola worked with three AI studios to produce the ads: Secret Level, Silverside AI and the Wild Card. Coca-Cola is not the first legacy brand to draw backlash for using generative AI in its ads. Toys “R” Us received criticism in June for a commercial created with OpenAI’s tool Sora that portrayed a boy walking through a toy aisle with wonderment until he was joined by the company’s mascot, Geoffrey the Giraffe.

But Coca-Cola, which is a major force in advertising, appears to be pushing headlong into AI despite any ruffled feathers. Last year, the company released a limited edition drink, Coca-Cola Y3000, that boasted on the can’s label: “Co-Created with AI.”

“We hope that Coca-Cola will still be as relevant and refreshing in the year 3000 as it is today,” the company said in a statement at the time. “So we challenged ourselves to explore the concept of what a Coke from the future might taste like.”