The holiday season may just be starting Thanksgiving Day And Black Fridaybut hatred of AI is always timely. Enter a new holiday ad from Coca-Cola that's getting backlash for using generative artificial intelligence to bring scenes to life—or at least that's what it tried to do.
The commercial is quite simple. A Coca-Cola truck drives through a winter landscape into a snowy town, and woodland animals awaken to follow the truck and the contents of a soda bottle to a lit Christmas tree in the town square. It has the characteristic flavor of video generation using artificial intelligence.
If this sounds familiar, it's because Coca-Cola did almost the same thing last year with Holiday advertising with artificial intelligence This also touched a nerve. The company has been proving that it hasn't learned its lesson over the past year and won the hearts and minds of its customers.
I'm an AI reporter and an expert on creative AI tools. So I wasn't surprised when I saw the ad and the backlash. There has been a surge in creative generative AI tools, especially in the past year with the emergence of a plethora of AI tools. created specifically for marketers. They promise to help you create content, automate workflows, and analyze data. According to the company, a huge portion (94%) of marketers have a dedicated budget for AI, and three-quarters of them expect that budget to grow. Canva Marketing and AI Report 2025.
What really surprised me was that in this advert people are holding up pitchforks and torches. It's so tame. Even softly. Compared to the rise of racist, inappropriate and sloppy AI-generated content As we've seen lately, Coca-Cola ads are tantalizingly cute. AND This problem.
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This joyful, festive commercial manages to touch on all the controversial issues around artificial intelligence, which is why it evokes such a strong reaction from viewers. AI content is becoming—has already become—normalized. We can't avoid chatbots on the Internet and Backup slop in our feeds. The use of AI in Coca-Cola advertising is another sign that companies are pushing ahead with AI without really thinking about how we will react to it. Like advertising, artificial intelligence is inevitable.
If AI in advertising is here to stay, it's worth looking into how it's used and where we as media consumers don't want it used. And while this isn't a defense of Coca-Cola or artificial intelligence, at least the company did something right with this particular ad.
Detection of artificial intelligence in Coca-Cola advertising
The “Holidays are Coming” advertisement is redo popular Coca-Cola ad from 1995. IN behind the scenes videoCoca-Cola talks about how it was created. Obviously, where artificial intelligence was used to create animals. But I'm not sure I believe the company went pixel by pixel in creating its fuzzy friends.
This panda bear is clearly not a real shot, but it has a special AI quality to it, part glitter, part plastic.
Coca-Cola's AI animals don't look realistic; they are like AI. There is some detail in their fur, but these smaller elements are not as pronounced as they could be. They are also not uniform throughout the animal's body. You can see that the fur becomes less detailed further into the animal. This is the kind of detailed work that AI video generators face, but a (human) animator would likely pick up on it and correct it.
The mother polar bear has shaggier fur on her cheek than on the top of her head. I can say with confidence that no polar bear has such smooth fur.
The animals make exaggerated faces of surprise as the truck passes them, their mouths forming perfect circles. This is another sign of AI. In the behind-the-scenes video, you can see someone going through different artificial intelligence options for a sea lion's nose, which is a common feature of artificial intelligence programs. There is also a feature very similar to Photoshop Generative Fill. Google I see a video generator definitely used at least once.
At the bottom of the image, you can see that the Veo 3 model was chosen to create these Coca-Cola truck videos.
The company has been betting on artificial intelligence for some time, starting with Partnership 2023 with OpenAI. Even Coca-Cola's advertising agency, Publicis Group, boasted that it had taken business away from Coca-Cola. with an AI-focused strategy. It seems clear that the company will not be affected by customer aversion to AI.
All I want for Christmas are AI labels.
There's exactly one thing Coca-Cola got right: disclosing information about artificial intelligence at the beginning of the video. It's one thing to use AI in content creation; It's another thing entirely to lie about it. Labels are one of the best tools we have to help anyone who encounters a piece of content decipher whether it is real or artificial. Many social media apps allow you to simply switch settings before posting.
Notice the “Created by Real Magic AI” in the lower left corner.
It's so easy to say clearly, but many brands and creators don't disclose their use of AI because they're afraid of getting hate for it. If you don't want to get hated for using AI, don't use it! But letting people sit and argue about whether you did it or not is a waste of time. The fact that content generated by artificial intelligence becomes indistinguishable from real photos and videos, which is why we need to be clear about when they are used.
It is our collective responsibility as a society to be transparent in how we use AI. Social media platforms are trying to flag AI-generated content, but these systems are not perfect. We need to understand that Coca-Cola did not lie to us about this AI-generated content. This is a very, very low bar, but many others don't clear it. (I'm looking at you, Mariah Carey. Just tell us if you used AI in your new Holiday ad with Sephora!)
AI in advertising
In June, Vogue readers were outraged when the American magazine ran an ad for Guess. with a model created by artificial intelligence. Models of that time spoke out about how AI makes working on campaigns more difficult. Eagle-eyed fans caught J.Crew using AI photography a month later. Toys R Us made headlines last year when it launched weird ad with AI giraffealthough it said it was based on an early version of OpenAI's Sora.
What was really annoying about Guess and J.Crew's use of AI was how obvious it was that the AI was being used instead of real models and photographers. While Coca-Cola and Toys R Us' use of AI was equally obvious, the AI animals did not act in the same way. As the president of Toys R Us put it, “We didn’t set out to hire a giraffe.” Points for honesty?
However, it is more than likely that real people lost their jobs while creating these AI ads. The Coca-Cola commercial could have been created and perhaps improved by using animators, designers and illustrators. Job loss due to AI worries US adultsand people working in the creative industries Of course, they are at risk. And it's not that AI image and video generators are ready to completely replace workers. That's because for business, the appeal of AI in terms of cutting-edge efficiency provides executives with a simple rationale. This is exactly what just happened in Amazon as he laid off thousands of workers.
It's easy to look at Coca-Cola's AI holiday ad and dismiss it as just another dumb corporate misstep, especially when there are so many other things to worry about. But in our strange new AI reality, it's important to highlight both the quiet moments that normalize this important, controversial technology, and the breakthrough moments.
So this holiday season, I think I'll drink Pepsi's Poppi cranberry soda instead of Coke Zero.
