Holidays are coming … and so are AI-generated adverts

Holidays are coming, which means an illuminated caravan of red Coca-Cola trucks is trundling through commercial breaks on a mission to deliver Coke to people living in remote, snowy, Coke-deprived places. This year, there’s a difference. The happy Coke recipients aren’t really people. They’re AI-generated, as is the whole advertisement. It’s an AI “reimagination” of its original 1990s Christmas campaign spewed out by a machine for no good reason.
If the aim was to enrage viewers, it’s worked. But that is not, unsurprisingly, the usual goal of a Coca-Cola Christmas advert. Usually, the idea is to associate its brand indelibly with festive cheer and goodwill. The soft drinks giant’s European chief marketing officer, Javier Meza, told Marketing Week that it had used AI to be “efficient” and to bring the Holidays Are Coming spot “into the present”.
The only conclusion to be drawn here is that the present sucks. Correctly derided as “slop”, the AI Coca-Cola ads — there are three versions in total — look cheap and feel unsettlingly artificial. They are the opposite of the real thing.
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The worst element is the “uncanny valley” effect triggered by AI-generated faces. But they’re not the only problem. The AI adverts are free of the sense of awe and excitement found in their predecessors. The iconic trucks may be travelling across the screen, but they seem oddly static at the same time. We see a wagging tail, but the rest of the dog is barely moving.
The Scrooge-like decision to bypass human creatives in favour of AI, hailing as it does from a big advertiser that isn’t shy of money, is a dismaying indication of the AI-enabled shortcuts that will be taken across the industry in future and is, indeed, already being taken. Coca-Cola won’t be the only one going down this fake road.
No one expects advertisements to be bastions of authenticity. But ditching visual artists, actors, directors and everybody else involved in the making of one in favour of an AI regurgitation has consequences, and not just for those who have lost work. The brand, too, suffers from putting out low-quality, heart-free work that leaves everyone feeling flat.