Coca-Colas Growing AI Dependency

Holiday advertising often counts on consistent creative decisions to appeal to nostalgia, togetherness, and tactics that will pull on a viewer's heartstrings. Coca-Cola's marketing team has ruffled through the file cabinets to find inspiration for their latest holiday commercial.

The latest commercial, titled "The Holiday Magic is coming", uses inspiration from Coca-Cola's 1985 commercial "Holidays Are Coming". Two notable similarities are the fleet of decorated Coca-Cola trucks and a corporate holiday jingle. That is where the similarities end.

While the former uses quaint set pieces and tasteful cinematography to capture the spirit of the holidays, the modern rendition uses uncomfortable AI animation and an updated jingle. The newest commercial, perhaps impressive by AI standards, has an inherent fuzziness and illusion of detail common with AI imagery that sticks out in almost every second of the commercial.

Featured to the left is a frame from Coca-Cola's AI commercial.

It appeared the intro scene was the only part rendered by a human being, which was, by no surprise, the most impressive scene.

According to Coca-Cola's European CMO, Javier Meza, "The brief was, we want to bring 'Holidays Are Coming' into the present and then explored AI as a solution to that".

Of the three AI effects companies commissioned to create a rendition of this project (Secret Level, Silverside AI, and Wild Card), it appears Coca-Cola went with Silverside AI as they are the only company to present "Holiday Magic is coming" on their website.

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Coca-Cola has used AI in advertising in the past, most notably in the commercial "Masterpiece", in which a bottle of Coke is passed around between art subjects at a museum. In this commercial, OpenAI's stable diffusion AI model transformed the bottle to match the style of the piece of art holding it. This commercial received much less criticism because AI was employed as a tool, and not the sole artistic medium of the commercial. It was not total "slop" as many now refer to AI-generated media.

Depiction of Coke bottle animated alongside the painting "Scream" in Masterpiece.

I must admit that I found this commercial to be very gorgeous. The transitions were incredibly fluid, and the variety of art styles depicted, in motion, was extraordinary.

Reaction

The initial disgust with Coca-Cola is not that AI was used, but how quickly they came to rely on it. Perhaps "rely" is a bit severe, but Coca-Cola is certainly in a testing phase to see how much AI they can get away with, and what effects it may have on their bottom line.

Perhaps this is an impressive marketing ploy. Afterall, all publicity is good publicity. There certainly is a lot of publicity surrounding Holiday Magis is Coming. Such publicity echoes the term "souless".

Other AI Usage for Coca-Cola

While looking through Coca-Cola's YouTube for more possible uses of AI I found "Ramadan is Coming", a visually impressive ad posted one year after after Masterpiece. Coca-Cola also posted two behind-the-scenes videos focusing on the music and animation of the ad. The bright, extensive set pieces built via 2.5D and step-frame animation was akin to 'Spider Man: Into the Spider-Verse/Across the Spider-Verse'. They show footage of the development of the ad, and at no point is there a mention of AI.

Since Masterpiece, Coca-Cola has released four computer-generated/animated ads:

• Ramadan is Coming (No AI)

• A 15-second commercial for Coke Zero x League of Legends (No AI)

• A 15-second Coca-Cola year for their flavor Y3000 (Presumably uses AI though phrasing is confusing; could be referring to flavors packaging)

• Holiday Magic is Coming. (Totally AI)

In just over a year, at least 2/5 of Coca-Cola's animated and computer-generated commercials included or were fully created using AI. Outside of advertising, the Y3000 flavor and the can it is sold in were both "co-designed" using AI as well. This further proves no professional industry can remain untouched by AI.

Future Impact

Consumerism proves relentlessly that shortcuts will be taken, and everything can be sacrificed to count an extra dollar. Employee satisfaction, product quality, customer experience; nothing is guaranteed. How quickly is the labor of art losing significance? Does art stand to lose more than other industries? It simply feels lazy to hand AI the reigns at a time when artistic mediums have become so incredibly abundant and accessible.

This is not to say that AI companies do not have employees that work hard. Much of what these companies work on is beyond comprehension for the average person, and AI can certainly produce impressive results.

But Coca-Cola's actions put the power of creativity into the hands of a computer.

There is always the "labor reallocation" argument of course. Companies will always need engineers to maintain and improve their AI models, HR reps to mediate, and lawyers to protect the company. However, this certainly would not be a 1:1 conversion and would take at least a generation before any meaningful losses in art industries would be mended by gains in the AI industry. This logic does not account for the millions of artists today who can't just switch careers

Of course, replacing all art production with AI cannot and will not work. Art is not a computational entity. There is no algorithm for creating the most appealing commercial, billboard, or movie (I acknowledge trends and aesthetic principles do exist, yes). In a world where creative freedom, job freedom, and decent compensation become increasingly scarce, it is best to remain vigilant that the shareholders and executives put the dollar above all else.