The holiday season may just be beginning, but hating on AI is always in season. Enter a new holiday-themed ad from Coca-Cola that's provoking blowback for its use of generative AI to bring its scenes to life – or at least, that's what it attempted to do.
The commercial is pretty basic. A Coca-Cola truck drives through a wintry landscape and into a snowy town, and forest animals awaken to follow the truck and its soda bottle contents to a lit Christmas tree in a town square. It has a distinctive sheen of AI video generation.
If that sounds familiar, it's because Coca-Cola did pretty much the same thing last year with an AI holiday ad that also touched a nerve. The company is proving that it hasn't learned its lesson or won the hearts and minds of its customers over the past year.
I'm an AI reporter and an expert in AI creative tools. So I was pretty unsurprised when I saw the ad and the backlash. There has been a surge in creative generative AI tools, especially in the past year, with numerous AI tools built specifically for marketers. They promise to help create content, automate workflows and analyze data. A huge proportion (94%) of marketers have a dedicated AI budget, and three-quarters of them expect that budget to grow, according to Canva's 2025 Marketing and AI report.
What did surprise me was that this ad is the one that has people raising their pitchforks and torches. It's so tame. Bland, even. Compared to the uptick of racist, inappropriate and slop-tastic AI-generated content we've seen lately, the Coca-Cola ad is tantalizingly benign. And that's the problem.
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This feel-good, festive commercial manages to hit upon every single controversial issue in AI, which is why it's inspiring such strong reactions from viewers. AI content is becoming -- has already become -- normalized. We can't escape chatbots online and AI slop in our feeds. Coca-Cola using AI in a commercial is yet another sign that companies are plowing ahead with AI without truly considering how we'll react. Like advertisements, AI is inescapable.
If AI in advertising is here to stay, it's worth breaking down how it's used and where we, as media consumers, don't want to see it used. And while this is very much not a defense of Coca-Cola or AI, there is at least one thing the company did right with this specific ad.
Spotting the AI in Coca-Cola's ad
Coca-Cola's "The Holidays Are Coming" ad is actually a remake of its popular 1995 ad by the same name. In a behind-the-scenes video, Coca-Cola breaks down how it was created. It's obvious where AI was used to create the animals. But I'm not sure I believe the company went "pixel by pixel" to create its fuzzy friends.
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