Coca-Cola’s holiday ad is AI slop yet again
The soft drink beverage giant may want to change its “always the real thing” song
🤖 Coca-Cola’s latest holiday ad is poor quality and relies on AI, just like last year’s campaign
🐼 The ad features inconsistent and unconvincing AI-generated animals, lacking creative direction and artistic merit
👎 Despite the involvement of AI specialists and a large team, the ad’s execution is poor
🤷♂️ The use of the slogan “always the real thing” ironically highlights the artificial nature of the advertisement
Remember when Coca-Cola’s holiday ad would fill you with the festive spirit? Now, it only serves as a depressing reminder that AI slop is here to stay.
Last year, I called out Coca-Cola for its AI-generated holiday ads, which had all the hallmarks that we’ve come to expect from artificial intelligence videos: image inconsistencies, a cartoony, super-imposed look, and an uncanny recreation of human faces and hands.
Remarkably, this year’s Coca-Cola holiday ad is somehow even worse. Instead of focusing on humans, the ad revolves around animals this time. However, there’s zero rhyme or reason as to which animals appear and how convincing they look.
The ad begins with AI Santa awkwardly opening a can of steamy Coke and pushing a toy lorry down a street. After the iconic Coca-Cola trucks appear, we see a smeary, digitized polar bear lift its head, followed by some penguins flapping with excitement.
For some reason, the next animals to greet the Coca-Cola trucks are some open-mouthed hedgehogs, suggesting they have some sort of human consciousness, followed by a hyper-stylized looking panda that Bing image generator could have created.
We then see the trucks oddly gliding across the snowy ground, only to be greeted by a sloth that I’d estimate is at least 100ft up in the trees. The advert then throws in some nondescript birds, seals that presumably live in a freshwater river, a horde of rabbits (also open-mouthed), two golden Labrador puppies and some seriously strange-looking squirrels.
Oh, and right at the end of the advert, it looks like the Coca-Cola truck is going to plow down a load of people but magically slows down despite the wintry conditions. Cool!
Overall, it’s a total mess, lacking any sort of creativity, artistic direction or soul. It’s only made worse by Coca-Cola’s “always the real thing” song ironically playing in the background.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Coca-Cola teamed up with Silverside and Secret Level on its holiday campaign, two of the AI studios that previously worked on the equally awful 2024 Coke Christmas ads.
Surprisingly, Coca-Cola says 100 people worked on this, which includes five “AI specialists” from Silverside who were needed to prompt, turn out and refine more than 70,000 video clips.
Bah, humbug.
Up next: Neo 1X is a humanoid robot that’ll try to do the housework for you – and it’s out next year
Adam Vjestica is The Shortcut’s Senior Editor. Formerly TechRadar’s Gaming Hardware Editor, Adam has also worked at Nintendo of Europe as a Content Marketing Editor, where he helped launch the Nintendo Switch. He also runs a retro gaming YouTube channel called Game on, boy! Follow him on X @ItsMrProducts.