{"id":275885,"date":"2025-11-06T20:54:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-06T20:54:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/275885\/"},"modified":"2025-11-06T20:54:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-06T20:54:08","slug":"maker-of-cokes-ai-holiday-ad-defends-his-choices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/275885\/","title":{"rendered":"Maker of Coke’s AI Holiday Ad Defends His Choices"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThis year\u2019s Coca-Cola<\/a>\u2018s AI ad-drop was supposed to be different. Different than last year\u2019s bashing, what with smoother tech. Different from last year\u2019s controversy, what with more consumer acceptance. The critics, producers hoped, might be subdued.<\/p>\n

\n\tSo much for that.<\/p>\n

\n\tSeveral days after the animated \u201cholidays are coming\u201d spot debuted<\/a>, the backlash among the creative class seems as as strong as, well, when Coke released its AI \u201cholidays are coming\u201d spot last year.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Evil and Good Wife creator Robert King posted on X<\/a> that the animal-centric animation \u201cworked better as ZOOTOPIA\u201d and suggested Disney might want to think about suing Coke in addition to Midjourney (unlikely).<\/p>\n

\n\tThe anti-AI Hollywood concept artist Reid Southen\u00a0called it<\/a> \u201cStupid, ugly trash.\u201d Another illustrator, Karla Ortiz, called for<\/a> a boycott.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd the Gravity Falls writer Alex Hirsch, who had sharp words for the ad last year, returned to the well this November, noting<\/a> that \u201c\u2019the genie is out of the bottle, and you\u2019re not going to put it back in\u2019 \u2013 your boss firing you on Christmas,\u201d citing a line from a Coke exec in The Hollywood Reporter\u2019s story from Monday<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThis kind of criticism was something the maker of the main ad (there are several versions), an L.A.-based AI studio founder named Jason Zada, was prepared for. Zada, whose company Secret Level was also behind last year\u2019s ad, believes people aren\u2019t understanding the creativity that goes into the work, which includes many animated animals <\/a>and an AI Santa Claus generated by archival Coca-Cola drawings. Speaking to THR on Friday just a few days before the ad\u2019s release, he made an insistent case that producing an AI commercial is at heart no different from making any animated film. The conversation was edited for brevity and clarity.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tFirst, tell me about the reaction to last year\u2019s ad. Did it surprise you?<\/p>\n

\n\tWe did the Coca-Cola spot and it was met with\u00a0very\u00a0mixed reaction. Because I think at the time it was the sort of thing a lot of normal consumers weren\u2019t on board with yet. But the last year has been crazy. There are things upsetting Hollywood, but the brand side has gone all in in an enormous way. The Coca-Cola ad was a wake up call to a lot of people in marketing that it was OK to do it this way. It shifted the conversation: There\u2019s a really traditional way to do it and there is a brand new way to do it.<\/p>\n

\n\tDo you understand the criticism of people who say that the brand new way is really just a repurposing of the old way \u2014 that LLMs aren\u2019t really a departure, just a rehash?<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s a lot of human artistry. This new ad was done by 20 people. There was a lot of hand-drawn character designs that went into it, a lot more sketching and world-building.<\/p>\n

\n\tMore than last year but less than an ad like this normally would have, right?<\/p>\n

\n\tYes, but animation is always all about artistry. AI could do some things well but it can\u2019t do everything well. There\u2019s a lot more that goes in than most people think in terms of hand-drawing characters and animating them and all the details that go into a production. It\u2019s not just saying a series of words and pressing buttons. I hope people can see that. We do a lot of fine tuning, a lot of very specific things to make the animation just like traditional animation. I have a 20-year-old daughter going to school for 3D animation; she\u2019s my toughest critic. Human creativity is at the core of what we do. Like this Coca-Cola ad, or the will.i.am piece [another Secret Level project].\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tYou\u2019re making the argument that AI is a tool, basically \u2014 it\u2019s just a device like any other piece of tech.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s just using technology to help the human creativity and collaboration. We work with a global network of artists to pull these campaigns together. These campaigns are very time consuming. AI just gives us the opportunity to do it a lot faster. With traditional animation a piece like this would take months and months. This took less than a month. The efficiencies you could get with AI \u2014 we could iterate faster and move faster. We could move at the speed of culture.<\/p>\n

\n\tCritics would say that speed isn\u2019t really speed \u2014 it\u2019s just using what other people did only you didn\u2019t hire them.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe world is not moving slower. If you need a campaign last-minute there\u2019s no way to do a massive project at scale without AI. It simply wouldn\u2019t get done. Hollywood moves super slow and the brand side moves super fast. We play on both sides of the field so it\u2019s interesting to see the difference. But efficiency at scale is becoming more of a standard in both worlds.<\/p>\n

\n\tLet\u2019s talk about the job element, since that has been a big part of the criticism of the output of AI studios. Do you feel like you are reducing the number of jobs out there for human artists?<\/p>\n

\n\tWell, look at [Latvian animated Oscar winner] Flow. They produced a movie at a quality that won an Academy Award without the massive overbloated amount of people it takes to make an animated movie. Small and mighty teams; we\u2019ll see a lot more of that. [Note: Flow was made with a high-end tool called Blender, which uses a lot of tech but is not Generative AI.] As the business moves forward this is a big part of why we see AI as a massively empowering tool versus something that\u2019s going to kill jobs. I look at it in terms of visual effects back in the day. You had model builders and painters who now maybe had less work when computers came around but it created a whole new market that employed way more people than the traditional model.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat is true, but that was because you needed large teams to work with the tech tools. The point of Generative AI is the tech does the bulk of the work on its own.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere are many people who will work with AI. I gave a Ted Talk on on this \u2014 \u201cdivided by AI.\u201d There are two sides. The \u201cI\u2019m scared, I don\u2019t know what my job is going to be in the future.\u201d And the other side, the \u201cI\u2019m leaning in\u201d side. I speak at a lot of conferences. In my opinion the best people who use AI are those who work as artists. If you do that it\u2019s the ultimate superpower. You can now do what you do and do it faster. That\u2019s my view \u2014 if you lean in and embrace it you could do ten times more than you could do before. At the scale you want to do it you would need ten more people. And now it might be you and one more person. The teams will be smaller but they could usher in a renaissance of creativity. You move a lot faster, you could do a lot more with the same resources.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s the argument at the corporate level too, right, that in this new \u201cefficiency\u201d age brands or Hollywood productions won\u2019t reduce budgets? They\u2019ll maintain budgets, just now produce more. Do you believe that?<\/p>\n

\n\tIf you could do more with less you will do more. We tell our clients this is not about spending less money. It\u2019s about using budgets more efficiently. With this film we could create a 90-second version [in addition to the 60-second spot] and a customized version. We couldn\u2019t do that without the efficiencies of AI.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat do you think has changed most in the last year besides the tech, which pretty much everyone agrees looks a lot better comparatively?<\/p>\n

\n\tI don\u2019t think consumers had a lot of experience with it yet last year. We were hearing about it a lot on TV and radio but people hadn\u2019t used it, they hadn\u2019t seen it. Now they have.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd you believe many of them like what they see.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe reason our spot tested so well last year was because the average consumer doesn\u2019t really care. With our new ad we go around the world and see animals from different parts of the world. We put happiness on faces, smiles on faces. Why would you get mad about something like that?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This year\u2019s Coca-Cola\u2018s AI ad-drop was supposed to be different. Different than last year\u2019s bashing, what with smoother…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":275886,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[1276,182,181,507,14011,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-275885","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-advertising","9":"tag-ai","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-coca-cola","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275885"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275885\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}