Coca-Cola again with AI generator for Christmas ad + video

Coca-Cola has once again used artificial intelligence to recreate a new version of its classic holiday caravan ad, but experts say the ad has taken away some of the joy and genuineness of the brand’s customers.

Coca-Cola ran three AI-powered holiday ads last year, which were criticized for flaws such as unnatural and mismatched faces, The Verge reported. This year, the brand created another AI-powered ad for the upcoming holiday season, which suffers from almost the same structural problems. In addition, the concern about removing humans from the creation of advertisements has also been raised again.

Criticism of Coca-Cola’s artificial intelligence ad continues

In this new ad titled Holidays Are Coming, Coca-Cola has tried to reduce the difficulty of simulating the faces of real humans by showing a collection of different animals. However, the art style is inconsistent throughout the video. The video tries to be realistic in some scenes and sometimes shows cartoon faces with exaggerated eyes. The polar bears and pandas also move unnaturally, looking like sped-up 2D images that were hand-shaken rather than true 3D models.

Compared to advanced deepfake videos created with tools like OpenAI’s Sora 2 or Google’s Veo 3, Coca-Cola’s new ad looks very artificial and uncoordinated.

According to the Wall Street Journal report, Coca-Cola has collaborated with two artificial intelligence studios Silverside and Secret Level for this holiday campaign. These two studios are the same teams that previously worked on Coca-Cola’s 2024 Christmas ads.

Coca-Cola declined to comment on the cost of its new holiday campaign, but said about 100 people were involved in the project, roughly the same number as the company’s older products, which were made without the use of artificial intelligence.