According to The Verge, Coca-Cola has launched another AI-generated holiday campaign following last year’s controversial ads that featured gliding wheels and uncanny human faces. The new “Holidays Are Coming” commercial attempts to sidestep human generation issues by featuring various animals, but suffers from inconsistent visual styles and unnatural movement. The company partnered with AI studios Silverside and Secret Level, with five AI specialists from Silverside prompting and refining more than 70,000 AI video clips. Coca-Cola’s Chief Marketing Officer Manolo Arroyo told The Wall Street Journal that the campaign was cheaper and faster to produce, reducing production time from a year to approximately one month while involving around 100 people, comparable to traditional productions. This continued AI push comes despite previous controversies, including a commercial that fabricated a book by author J.G. Ballard.
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The Quality vs. Speed Trade-Off
Coca-Cola’s admission that their AI approach cuts production time from a year to a month reveals a fundamental shift in creative priorities. While speed and cost savings are attractive to any marketing department, they come at the expense of the polished, consistent quality that built Coca-Cola’s holiday advertising legacy. The visual inconsistencies described in the new campaign suggest that AI tools still struggle with maintaining coherent artistic direction across multiple scenes and characters. This creates a jarring viewing experience that undermines the emotional connection holiday ads traditionally aim to establish.
The Technical Reality Behind AI Video
Despite rapid advances in AI video generation from companies like OpenAI and Google, Coca-Cola’s campaign demonstrates that enterprise-level advertising still requires significant manual intervention. The involvement of 100 people and the generation of 70,000 video clips to create a single commercial indicates that AI is far from a plug-and-play solution. Each of those clips required human prompting, review, and selection, creating a different kind of labor-intensive process rather than eliminating human involvement entirely. The technical limitations become particularly apparent in character animation, where AI still struggles with consistent physics, anatomy, and movement patterns that professional animators master through years of training.
The Brand Integrity Question
Coca-Cola’s repeated AI missteps—from last year’s gliding wheels to the recent fake book controversy—suggest a pattern of quality control issues that could damage consumer trust. Holiday advertising represents some of the most valuable real estate in a brand’s marketing calendar, serving as annual touchpoints that consumers anticipate and remember. When these moments feel rushed, inconsistent, or technically flawed, they risk diluting the premium positioning that global brands like Coca-Cola have spent decades building. The company’s willingness to accept these visual shortcomings for the sake of production speed raises questions about whether they’re prioritizing short-term efficiency over long-term brand equity.
Broader Industry Implications
Coca-Cola’s continued AI experimentation, despite public criticism, signals to other major brands that the technology is becoming an acceptable part of the advertising toolkit regardless of current quality limitations. This creates pressure throughout the industry to adopt similar cost-cutting measures, potentially accelerating the displacement of traditional creative roles. However, the substantial human involvement required for these “AI-generated” campaigns suggests we’re witnessing a transitional phase where AI augments rather than replaces human creativity. The real risk lies in brands accepting mediocre results in exchange for speed, potentially lowering the overall quality bar for commercial content across the industry.
The Road Ahead for AI in Advertising
Looking forward, the success of AI in advertising will depend on whether companies can achieve both efficiency gains and quality standards. Coca-Cola’s current approach appears to prioritize the former at the expense of the latter, creating a cautionary tale for other brands considering similar transitions. As AI tools continue to improve, the key differentiator may become how brands integrate these technologies while maintaining the creative vision and technical excellence that define premium advertising. The companies that succeed will likely be those that view AI as a tool to enhance human creativity rather than replace it entirely, recognizing that emotional connection and visual polish remain essential to effective brand storytelling.
