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Coca-Cola Doubles Down on AI Holiday Ads Despite Backlash

The ads feature animals after last year’s humans were blasted for their “uncanny valley” look.

Coca-Cola is going full steam ahead with AI-generated holiday commercials, despite facing criticism for the quality and ethics of the ads. Since last year, the company has used generative AI to create its classic “Holidays Are Coming” ads showing truckloads of Coca-Cola being transported through festive towns and forests. Last year, viewers complained that the AI-generated characters had shiny, dead-eyed features, while animators blasted the firms that produced the ads for not employing artists to create the spots. This year, the company is relying on an all-animal cast of characters and arguing that “human storytellers” are still at the core of the AI productions. But the AI spots are cheaper and faster to create, requiring just a month of work as opposed to an entire year, according to Coca-Cola’s chief marketing officer. To create one of the ads, just five AI specialists were needed to prompt, turn out, and refine more than 70,000 video clips. A team of about 100 people total worked on the ads across Coca-Cola, its advertising agency WPP, and the AI studios Silverside and Secret Level that made the pots.