The Coca-Cola AI Christmas advert can be studied as an example of what happens when a company risks decades of hard-won brand equity through the use of nascent tech that's still not up to the job to try to save a few bucks. Despite the noisy backlash against last year's rudimentary effort, Coca-Cola tried again this year – apparently out of pure pigheadedness.
Based on what the company's been saying, it sounds like the aim of this year's Christmas ad was less about building brand storytelling and more about trying to prove itself right after last year's disaster.
Pratik Thakar, Coca-Cola’s global VP of generative AI, said that this time around the brand “controlled every cinematic detail” to achieve “seamless narrative continuity and character consistency”. But it seems the public at large has a better eye for detail than Coca-Cola's own team.
In a post on LinkedIn, the AI consultant Dino Burbidge points out the glaring lack of consistency and continuity in the design of the trucks in the new AI Holidays are Coming ad, which was produced by AI studio Secret Level. At least one of the AI-generated vehicles appears to completely defy physics, putting half of the truck's payload beyond the last wheel.
Dino suggests that the problem with the ad is not AI per se, but the fact that no human appears to have checked what the AI models generated... or that more worryingly they checked but didn't care, which is extraordinary when the truck is the main character in the ad.
The graphic has already been shared elsewhere, including on X, where people point out even more inconsistencies than what are shown in the graphic, including the shape of the cabin of the truck, the nose and grill and the exhaust pipes, which also appear to change from shot to the next.
“It's Schrodinger's Truck. It can be short or long, depending on the timecode you stop at,” one person suggests.
Others have pointed out other inconsistencies in the ad, including changing roads and the position of objects like Christmas trees. There's also a fireplace with no opening for the chimney. But then perhaps it's not surprising when, according to Coca-Cola, the ad was made by a “tiny team of five specialists” who managed to “churn out” over 70,000 video clips in 30 days.
In the making-of video above, which also appears to be AI-generated, two anonymous voiceovers recognise that last year's ad was terrible and suggest more care was taken over this year's effort. People seem to disagree.
The only explanation people can think of is that Coca-Cola is running the campaign for rage engagement, but that seems bizarrely off brand, and particularly for a Christmas ad.
Curiously, while Coca-Cola is happy to resort to AI, some of the biggest AI developers have realised that it's not the way if they want to connect with people. Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI chatbot, turned to traditional techniques when it launched a campaign that included a Madvillain-soundtracked cinematic film produced by Love Song.
OpenAI's first Chat GPT ad campaign was even shot on 35mm film (yep, even OpenAI didn't use its Sora AI video generator, which is one of the apps named in Coca-Cola's making of video above. Apple's also shown that it still sees the value in traditional artisan approach – just look at the new Apple TV logo made from real glass.
