The Worst Thing About Coca-Cola’s Holiday Ad Isn’t the AI
The holiday season may have only just begun, but hatred towards AI is still in season. Enter a new holiday-themed commercial from Coca-Cola that’s causing backlash due to its use of generative AI to bring its scenes to life — or at least, that’s what it attempted to do.
The advertising is pretty basic. A Coca-Cola truck passes through a wintry landscape and enters a snowy town, and the forest animals wake up to follow the truck and the contents of its soda bottle to a lit Christmas tree in a town square. It has a distinctive AI video generation shine.
If this sounds familiar, that’s because Coca-Cola did much the same thing last year with an AI holiday commercial that also struck a chord. The company is proving that it has not learned its lesson or won the hearts and minds of its customers over the past year.
I’m an AI journalist and expert in AI creation tools. So I wasn’t surprised when I saw the publicity and the negative reactions. There has been a rise in creative generative AI tools, especially over the past year, with many AI tools designed specifically for marketers. They promise to help create content, automate workflows, and analyze data. A large proportion (94%) of marketers have a dedicated AI budget, and three-quarters expect this budget to increase, according to Canva’s Marketing and AI 2025 report.
What surprised me is that this ad is one where people raise their pitchforks and torches. It’s so tame. Bland, even. Compared to the increase in racist, inappropriate and AI-generated content As we have seen recently, Coca-Cola advertising is incredibly harmless. And It is the problem.
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This feel-good festival advert manages to tackle all the controversial issues surrounding AI, which is why it gets such strong reactions from viewers. AI content is becoming – has already become – standardized. We can’t escape online chatbots and AI slope in our feeds. Coca-Cola using AI in an ad is another sign that companies are jumping into AI without really thinking about how we will respond. Like advertising, AI is essential.
If AI in advertising is here to stay, it’s worth analyzing how it’s used and where we, as media consumers, don’t want to see it used. And while this isn’t really a defense of Coca-Cola or AI, there is at least one thing the company did right with this specific ad.
Spotting AI in Coca-Cola advertising
Coca-Cola’s “The Holidays Are Coming” commercial is actually a remake of its popular 1995 commercial of the same name. In a behind-the-scenes video, Coca-Cola explains how it was created. It is obvious that AI was used to create the animals. But I’m not sure I believe the company used “pixel by pixel” to create its fuzzy friends.
This panda is clearly not real footage, but it has this specific AI quality that is part shiny, part plastic.
Coca-Cola’s AI animals don’t look realistic; they look like AI. Their fur has some detail, but these finer elements are not as defined as they could be. They are also not consistent throughout the animal’s body. You can see that the fur becomes less detailed further down the animal. This kind of detailed work is something that AI video generators struggle with, but it’s something that a (human) animator would likely have captured and corrected.
The mother polar bear’s fur is shaggier on her cheek than on the top of her head. I can confidently say 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. You can see in the behind-the-scenes video that someone is clicking on different AI variants of a sea lion’s nose, which is a common feature of AI programs. There’s also a preview of a feature that looks an awful lot like Generative Fill in Photoshop. Google Veo video generator has definitely been used at least once.
In the lower part of the image you can see that the Veo 3 model was selected to create these videos of the Coca-Cola truck.
The company has been investing heavily in AI for some time, starting with a 2023 partnership with OpenAI. Even Coca-Cola’s advertising agency, Publicis Group, boasted that it had taken Coca-Cola’s business away with an AI-driven strategy. It seems clear that the company will not be swayed by its customers’ aversion to AI.
All I want for Christmas are AI labels
There is exactly one thing Coca-Cola got right, and that was the AI disclosure at the start of the video. It’s one thing to use AI in your content creation; lying about it is another. Tags are one of the best tools we have to help anyone who encounters content decipher whether it is real or AI. Many social media apps simply allow you to change a setting before posting.
Note the “Created by Real Magic AI” note in the lower left corner.
It’s so easy to be clear, but many brands and creators don’t disclose their use of AI because they’re afraid of being hateful. If you don’t want people to hate you for using AI, don’t use it! But letting people sit around and debate whether you did it or not is a waste of everyone’s time. The very fact that AI-generated content becomes indistinguishable from real photos and videos is exactly why we need to be extremely clear.
It is our collective responsibility as a society to be transparent about how we use AI. Social media platforms attempt to flag AI-generated content, but these systems are not perfect. We should understand that Coca-Cola did not lie to us about this AI-generated content. That’s a very, very low bar, but many others don’t exceed 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 furious when the US magazine published a Guess advert featuring an AI-generated model. Models at the time were talking about how AI was making it harder to work on campaigns. Eagle-eyed fans caught J.Crew using “AI photography” a month later. Toys R Us made headlines last year when it released a weird ad with an AI giraffealthough he indicated that it was made with an early version of OpenAI’s Sora.
What really stung about Guess and J.Crew’s use of AI was how obvious it was that AI was being used in place of real models and photographers. Although Coca-Cola and Toys R Us’ use of AI was equally clear, AI animals didn’t hit the same mark. As the president of Toys R Us said, “We weren’t going to hire a giraffe.” Points for honesty?
Even so, it’s more than likely that real humans lost jobs while creating these AI ads. The Coca-Cola ad could have been created, and probably improved, if it had used animators, designers and illustrators. Job loss due to AI worries American adultsand people working in the creative industries are certainly in danger. This is not because AI image and video generators are ready to replace workers entirely. Indeed, for businesses, the cutting-edge efficiency appeal of AI offers executives a simple rationale. This is exactly what just happened at Amazon, which laid off thousands of workers.
It’s easy to look at Coca-Cola’s Christmas ad about AI and dismiss it as yet another tone-deaf corporate mistake, especially when there are so many other things to worry about. But in our strange new AI reality, it’s important to highlight the quiet moments that normalize this controversial and consequential technology, just as much as the watershed moments.
So this holiday season, I think I’ll be drinking a Poppi cranberry sparkling soda owned by Pepsi instead of a Coke Zero.
