Coca-Cola is bringing back (AI) for another round of holiday magic. Following the backlash in 2024 over AI-generated holiday imagery, Coca-Cola’s 2025 campaign marks a new effort to combine holiday traditions with AI-generated storytelling. This time, the focus is on brighter imagery and stronger emotional appeal, while keeping the brand’s Christmas elements at the center of attention.
The “Holidays Are Coming” ad tries to sidestep the challenges of creating realistic humans by instead featuring a cast of creatures. There’s no consistent style, alternating between attempts at realism and blown-out eyes, and the polar bears, pandas, and sloths move unnaturally, like flat, carelessly animated images rather than fake 3D models in computer graphics.
Compared to the convincing deepfake videos generated by tools like OpenAI’s “Sora 2” or Google’s “Veo 3”, the videos created for this Coca-Cola ad feel very dated and lack the charm that you could get from investing more in human resources.
Many people and children around the world who wait for Coca-Cola’s Christmas commercials have been disappointed, as if by some miracle. It’s pompous, without any feeling or excitement, because it’s Christmas.
While the role of AI in the creative industries remains a subject of debate, Coca-Cola sees generative tools as a key part of its long-term marketing strategy.
Executives point to benefits such as faster production, more customizable workflows and scalable storytelling, all without reducing advertising spend. As Thakar puts it, the genie is already out of the bottle, and the only way forward is to continue experimenting or improving.
The only noticeable improvement, in my opinion, is that this year the wheels of the iconic Coca-Cola trucks actually spin continuously, rather than statically sliding across snow-covered roads.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Coca-Cola has partnered with Silverside and Secret Level for its latest holiday campaign, two of the artificial intelligence studios that previously worked on Coca-Cola’s 2024 Christmas commercials.
Coca-Cola hopes this year’s AI-driven campaign will be more enjoyable than last time. The visuals are more sophisticated, the storytelling is more refined, and the nostalgia is familiar enough to evoke emotion. It’s a bold mix of code and holiday cheer, but is it enough to get everyone in the holiday spirit?
Coca-Cola declined to comment on the cost of the new holiday campaign, according to The Wall Street Journal, but said about 100 people were involved in the project – a similar number to the company’s previous productions without AI. That number includes five “AI specialists” from “Silverside”, who helped create and refine more than 70,000 AI videos.
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