{"id":247228,"date":"2025-11-06T11:51:12","date_gmt":"2025-11-06T11:51:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/247228\/"},"modified":"2025-11-06T11:51:12","modified_gmt":"2025-11-06T11:51:12","slug":"cokes-new-ai-generated-ad-required-100-staff-and-70000-ai-generated-clips-and-it-still-looks-like-garbage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/247228\/","title":{"rendered":"Coke\u2019s New AI-Generated Ad Required 100 Staff and 70,000 AI-Generated Clips, and It Still Looks Like Garbage"},"content":{"rendered":"

Coca-Cola is back with another series of AI-generated ads to herald the holidays \u2014 and they look just as bad as they did last year<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The new ad campaign, titled the \u201cHolidays Are Coming,\u201d is a callback to the company\u2019s 1995 commercial<\/a> of the same name, and was made in collaboration with the AI firm Silverside AI, according to the Wall Street Journal<\/a>, which also helped with the company\u2019s first AI holidays ad.<\/p>\n

That initial foray at making a vague AI homage to the original classic was met with outrage and mockery last year. There was no shortage of dumb details to poke fun at, like the stiff and uncanny human faces, and the wheels on the Coke trucks that would randomly spin in different directions, if they were rotating at all.<\/p>\n

This time the AI got the wheels to spin properly, but seemingly Coke didn\u2019t trust the tech to render people anymore, since human faces are almost nowhere to be seen. Instead, the ad\u2019s Thomas-Kincade-filter landscapes are populated by a collection of no less uncanny animals, ranging from polar bears to \u2014 and we have no idea why \u2014 sloths, an animal almost nobody associates with the winter holidays.<\/p>\n

We do get one prominent depiction of a human face in the \u201cFantastical\u201d version<\/a> of the ad, reminding us of what we\u2019re missing: a close up of Santa Claus\u2019s grinning hyperrealistic mug, as well as his waving hand with fingers that briefly distort into impossible shapes. Afterwards, the slogan \u201cReal Magic\u201d appears on screen.<\/p>\n

In sum, the ad is very recognizably the work of an AI model. Movement is strangely fluid, and at once weightless and suspended in half-slow motion. All the shots are just that, shots, with no cohesion between the images.<\/p>\n

Coke shared a \u201cbehind the scenes\u201d video<\/a> of how its latest ad was made, which itself seems to be narrated by two AI voices. After bragging about wanting to go for \u201chyperrealism\u201d \u2014 an extremely odd aesthetic choice for a piece that\u2019s supposed to induce warm, cozy feelings \u2014 the company\u2019s dueling bored-sounding podcast personas revealed that the ad team \u201cchurned out\u201d more than 70,000 video clips to create a finished product, which sounds incredibly inefficient. The important part to Coke, though, was that it only took five \u201cAI specialists\u201d and a month to make. But in total, around 100 people were involved in the new commercial campaign, per the WSJ.<\/p>\n

All that for what is still a crummy looking product. If a before and after of the 2024 and 2025 Coke AI ads are taken as a barometer of AI image generating tech\u2019s progress, it\u2019s not looking very promising.<\/p>\n

Of course, maybe this is more of an embarrassing reflection on Coke\u2019s AI efforts in isolation, since video generating AIs have seen major leaps this year with releases of models like OpenAI\u2019s Sora 2<\/a> and Google\u2019s Veo 3<\/a>. On the other hand, these, too, may look bad once they\u2019re placed into a scenario where they\u2019re expected to produce full blown exhibitions of professional filmmaking instead of just the odd shot or two \u2014 even in an artform as commercial as, well, commercials.<\/p>\n

Look at Google\u2019s first AI-generated ad<\/a> which debuted last week, made with its state of the art Veo 3 model: it only features several seconds of AI footage across several disconnected shots, and all in just the right cartoonish style to avoid scrutiny.<\/p>\n

More on AI: Studio Ghibli Demands That OpenAI Stop Ripping Off Its Work<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Coca-Cola is back with another series of AI-generated ads to herald the holidays \u2014 and they look just…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":247229,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[22377,554,733,4308,22435,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-247228","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ad-campaign","9":"tag-ai","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-coca-cola","13":"tag-technology","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247228\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/247229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}