{"id":115712,"date":"2025-11-03T14:31:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-03T14:31:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/115712\/"},"modified":"2025-11-03T14:31:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-03T14:31:09","slug":"new-ai-holiday-ads-craftsmanship-is-so-much-better","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/115712\/","title":{"rendered":"New AI holiday ad’s “craftsmanship is so much better.”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tFor a few weeks last November, no villain loomed larger over Madison Avenue and social media that polices it than Coca-Cola<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe company\u2019s \u201cHolidays Are Coming\u201d spot, an homage to a classic 1995 ad<\/a>, featured the original\u2019s rhythmic anthem as trucks drove through various snowy landscapes. Only now the ad was filled with AI generated objects, animals and people<\/a> \u2014 a fact that did not go over well with creatives and many others on the Internet who nonetheless helped the ad rack up billions of impressions. \u201cCoca-Cola is red because it\u2019s made from the blood of out-of-work artists,\u201d decried<\/a> Hollywood writer Alex Hirsch, one of many such negative comments noting both the spot\u2019s labor ethics and its aesthetics.<\/p>\n

\n\tOn Monday, Coke is trying once more, releasing a new generative AI<\/a> holiday ad with the globe-trucking concept. Again, the company has hired the Los Angeles-based AI studio Secret Level to produce the spot. This time, though, the ad features just animals \u2014 the only person seen is a Santa Claus at the very end, based on the company\u2019s original drawings. (Coca-Cola inaugurated<\/a> the modern depiction of Santa.)<\/p>\n

\n\tThe company believes enough has changed in a year, in both the tech and society, to evoke a different response.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cLast year people criticized the craftsmanship. But this year the craftsmanship is ten times better,\u201d Pratik Thakar, global vice president and head of generative AI at Coca-Cola, tells The Hollywood Reporter. \u201cThere will be people who criticize \u2013 we cannot keep everyone 100 percent happy,\u201d he adds. \u201cBut if the majority of consumers see it in a positive way it\u2019s worth going forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a culture where Hollywood creators worry about an AI takeover while a video-watching citizenry braces itself for a wave of synthetic media from Sora 2 and others, an AI commercial at this level is no small thing. Coca-Cola is one of the world\u2019s most dominant brands and the holidays one of Madison Avenue\u2019s sacred human spaces. The unleashing of a spot by the former into the space of the latter could prove a litmus test for consumers\u2019 appetite for AI video while also, perhaps, serving as a tool further normalizing its consumption.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe ad features the now-famous Coca-Cola trucks driving through different locales as animals from seals to pandas look on, suggesting a globetrotting trip. It ends as a truck door swings open and Santa appears. The image of the icon was generated exclusively by the archival paintings of Haddon Sundblom that the Coca-Cola company owns; the artist in the 1930s created the original Coke ads for The Saturday Evening Post that gave rise to our conception of the mythic St. Nicholas as a girthful bearded man in a red-and-white suit.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile the current generation of AI videos can often take on a disorienting stylized quality, Coca-Cola sought to lean into the bug by choosing to portray the stylized characters of anthropomorphic animals, which they say they couldn\u2019t do before. \u201cLast year it was difficult to get those expressions from animals so we had to use human faces. Now technology has evolved to where we can,\u201d Thakar says.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe desired effect is that of a Madagascar or other modern CG animated movie that uses artists working from scratch instead of the approach here, of a model trained on thousands of earlier images. Jason Zada, Secret Level\u2019s founder and chief creative officer, says he hopes viewers cannot distinguish this spot from a traditional Hollywood animated movie.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u00a0\u201cThe best compliment I get is when people say a video doesn\u2019t look like AI,\u201d he tells THR.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe company used several Large Language Models to generate the creative. Two other versions of the \u201cholidays are coming\u201d ad were also made this year, an AI one with another studio, Silverside, and a traditionally-shot one without the stylized animals, for some Latin markets.<\/p>\n

\n\tAI is a perhaps unexpected focus for Coke, given the company\u2019s history of a kind of schmaltzy humanism in its marketing. In addition to the Sundblom Santa paintings, which also had the rosy-cheeked character holding a Coke bottle in the likes of Ladies Home Journal and The New Yorker, the company is famous for its 1971 ad <\/a>of a panoply of people from different backgrounds standing atop a mountain singing \u201cI\u2019d Like To Buy The World a Coke.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThakar says Coca-Cola is going through a \u201cmajor marketing transformation, a companywide transformation\u201d with AI at the center of the effort. The company was indeed one of the first to use the tech in a major ad when in 2023 it released \u201cMasterpiece,\u201d<\/a> which brought the subjects of museum paintings to life catching and tossing Coke bottles, an ad that did not cause the backlash of last year\u2019s holiday spot.<\/p>\n

\n\tZada believes social media gives a skewed impression of how some AI ads are going over.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe haters on the Internet are the loudest, he says. \u201cA lot of the people complaining last year were from the creative industry who were just afraid \u2014 afraid for their jobs, afraid for what it did. But I think the spot tested really well and average people really enjoyed it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tZada said labor fears were misplaced; while the Coke ad this year required fewer people to make it \u2014 he estimated it at 20, compared to the at least 50 a one-minute ad of this complexity might typically entail \u2014 such efficiencies he thinks means that more could be done in a short amount of time. Brands will allocate the same budgets, Zada believes, leading perhaps to smaller teams on a given ad but more creative overall. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cYou could do ten times as much at scale,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n

\n\tWhether Madison Avenue and Hollywood respond by doing more or just try to save money, however, remains to be seen. Coca-Cola\u2019s AI push can be seen as a way to increase its appeal among younger, more zeitgeist-y consumers as the company faces competition<\/a> from boutique sodas and other upstart beverages. But it also, in the long run, could save the company some cash, trimming at least some dollars off its reported<\/a> $5 billion advertising budget. Madison Avenue executives generally are bracing for <\/a>a potential significant downsizing in budgets\u00a0 as AI is deployed in areas from creative to research.<\/p>\n

\n\tThakar, who denies the company will spend less money on advertising overall in the AI age, says he\u2019s taking a long view of what the tech can do, backlash and all.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cLast year we decided to go all in, and it worked out well for us,\u201d he said, noting that \u201cconsumer engagement was very high. Yes, some parts of the industry were not pleased we were using a 100 percent Generative AI film, but that\u2019s part and parcel of doing something pioneering. We understand that concern. But we need to keep moving forward and pushing the envelope.\u201d He said the company was open to using it for activations in other times of the year, even high-impact ones like March Madness.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe genie is out of the bottle,\u201d he says, \u201cand you\u2019re not going to put it back in.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For a few weeks last November, no villain loomed larger over Madison Avenue and social media that polices…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":115713,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,1798,111,139,69,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-115712","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-coca-cola","12":"tag-new-zealand","13":"tag-newzealand","14":"tag-nz","15":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115712\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}