When under fire, duck behind fuzzy animals. That, more or less, seems to be Coca-Cola’s strategy as it continues dabbling with generative AI. Last year, the mega-beverage corporation drew grumbles online for using the new tech to produce a Christmas ad campaign that riffed on its classic 1995 “Holidays Are Coming” spot. The critiques were twofold. First there was the fact that it used generative AI at all, a technology critics associated with corporations eager to cut costs and, by extension, human labor. (“@CocaCola is ‘red’ because it’s made from the blood of out-of-work artists!” wrote the animator and writer Alex Hirsch at the time.) The second critique was that the ads looked terrible, which they did. The snowy, festive scenes were filled with the now-familiar hallmarks of visual AI slop: trees and buildings with plasticky textures; suspiciously smooth curvatures; synthetic people with lifeless eyes, glossy white teeth, and faces that seem like the base templates of a video-game character creator. The entire world looks like it’s covered in Saran wrap. Coke didn’t meaningfully address the backlash, instead releasing a generic statement noting that the company remained “dedicated to creating the highest level of work at the intersection of human creativity and technology.”
But it did mount a kind of response. This year, the company returned with yet another generative-AI-made holiday campaign, this time swapping out sloppy humans for even sloppier-looking animals: penguins, hedgehogs, seals, the requisite polar bears, an inexplicable sloth, plus Santa Claus, who isn’t real, so he fits the logic. And to head off complaints about potential lost jobs, Coca-Cola claimed that over 100 people worked on the ad campaign across the company; its advertising agency, WPP; and the two AI studios that produced the videos, Secret Level and Silverside. But this number appears to be decontextualized; as The Wall Street Journal noted, only five AI specialists were needed “to prompt, turn out and refine more than 70,000 video clips” that went into the creation of one of these ad spots. The irony is that, despite a full year of supposed technological advances, the ads in this new campaign look remarkably similar to the old one.
