Coca-Cola is taking another crack at holiday ads created with artificial intelligence, after last year's batch didn't go over so well. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the 2024 spots drew jeers from artists and ad pros, who complained about everything from truck wheels that didn't turn to unsettling, plastic-faced humans. This year, the iconic red trucks roll as they should, and the cast has shifted from awkward people to a broad menagerie of animals. See the "Holidays Are Coming" effort here. Coke isn't revealing how much the campaign cost, but Chief Marketing Officer Manolo Arroyo says using AI was quicker and cheaper than the old-school way—think a month instead of a year to pull the whole thing together.
The Journal sees clear "improvement on the execution," though the Verge is less impressed. "There's no consistent style, switching between attempted realism and a bug-eyed toony look, and the polar bears, panda, and sloth move unnaturally, like flat images that have been sloppily animated rather than rigged 3D models in CG," writes Jess Weatherbed.
Meanwhile, the concern over lost jobs persists. As the Hollywood Reporter notes, "an AI commercial at this level is no small thing," given Coca-Cola's massive advertising reach. A rough guess is that the ad took 20 people to make, compared with the 50 it would have taken the old way, according to Jason Zada of the AI studio Secret Level, which produced the spot. He argued, however, that firms such as Coca-Cola might therefore use smaller teams to create even more ads than usual. Either way, AI ads appear to be here for good. About 30% of digital ads this year are using some form of generative AI, up from 22% last year, and that number is expected to hit 39% by 2026, per the Journal.
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