Coca-Cola's iconic Holiday Magic advert created by AI leaves fans feeling sick

Source: © Coca-Cola Company Coca-Cola Company For many, seeing Coca-Cola’s Holidays Are Coming advert signals the symbolic beginning of the festive season, but this year the brand’s iconic advert sparked a different reaction as fans spotted the small disclaimer that reads, “created by Real Magic AI”

Finding out that the festive commercial was made using artificial intelligence (AI) – which many have killed off Santa Claus in the process – has left Xmas advert fans up in arms.

The Indepdendent quotes one person saying the AI element of the advert made them feel “sick”, while another added: “The world is so over if the Christmas Coca-Cola advert is made with AI”.

Iconic advert

The 15-second recreation of its famous Holidays are Coming ad is the company’s first use of generative AI in a TV Christmas campaign.
As a result, it did not cast a real person to play Father Christmas.

The advert, which first came to screens in 1995, shows an iconic Coca-Cola truck driving through a wintery landscape to the soundtrack Holidays Are Coming.

Coca-Cola says that in the original ad, three real 40ft trucks were used, weighing two tonnes each and covered with 30,000 light bulbs.

This year’s advert sees a fleet of Coca-Cola trucks driving through a snowy village. The door to a truck opens and a man is handed a glass bottle of Coke Zero by an unseen figure, but that figure is presumed to be Santa as we get a fleeting glimpse at his white cuff and red sleeve.

Woolly-hat revellers line the streets, gleefully sipping on Coke Zero as the Holidays Are Coming soundtrack plays. Santa does not feature otherwise.

"From polar bears emerging from wintry forests to the familiar sight of Santa Claus, these ads celebrate the brand’s heritage while exploring new possibilities with technology," says the brand.

"These spots retain the heart of Coca-Cola’s festive spirit, featuring snowy landscapes, festive animals, and the iconic Coca-Cola trucks, while adding a futuristic twist with AI-generated visuals, including digital actors created with permission from real likenesses.

"The campaign showcases how AI can accelerate production while maintaining creativity and tradition."

"By eliminating the need for costly live filming in snowy locations, Coca-Cola tapped into AI’s ability to create immersive, heartwarming visuals in record time.

Collaboration between humans and AI

Following the outrage the brand has defended the advert, stating it was a collaboration between humans and AI.

The statement says, “The Coca-Cola Company has celebrated a long history of capturing the magic of the holidays in content, film, events, and retail activations for decades around the globe.

“We are always exploring new ways to connect with consumers and experiment with different approaches. This year, we crafted films through a collaboration of human storytellers and the power of generative AI.”

But consumers refused to buy into it, blasting the ad as a “creepy dystopian nightmare”.

Forbes also reports that “Aside from the “unbearably” choppy commercial (there are 10 shots in just 15 seconds), many commentators argued it’s a poor attempt to cheapen labour in the film and technology industry and kill jobs”.

Three AI studios (Secret Level, Silverside AI and Wild Card) created the ads, using the generative AI models Leonardo, Luma and Runway, with a new model, Kling, brought in near the end of production.

The new AI-generated ads highlight the weaknesses and hard limitations of the current wave of video-generation models.

Generating human beings without creating grotesque distortions, eerie facial expressions and unnatural movements is hugely challenging for AI.

In AdAge Secret Level founder Jason Zada spoke about the production process behind the Coca-Cola ads, and explained that Kling helped make the human motion “more realistic.”

An attempt to cheapen labour and kill jobs

In the ad details are “off,” such as the truck wheels gliding across the ground without spinning in the establishing shot, and the distorted proportions as the trucks enter the city, with bystanders rendered so large that they would not be able to fit through the truck doors.

In the background, some of the Christmas lights and buildings have nonsensical shapes and patterns.

Forbes quotes Zada on a simple opening shot featuring an AI-generated squirrel that proved particularly tricky, saying,” “We must have run that squirrel [through AI] at the beginning of that video a couple of hundred times”.

One commentator quoted in Forbes says this simply isn’t efficient.

“Using an energy-intensive technology to spit out footage in the hope that some shots are usable, touching up the best examples, and being left with very short clips that are riddled with “hallucinations” seems like a poor outcome.

It adds that many commentators who work in film and television were “not impressed by the ad, and many dismissed the technology as a poor attempt to cheapen their labour and kill jobs”.

The campaign was developed by Bain & Company and WPP Open X, including Essence Mediacom, BCW, Ogilvy and Obviously.

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