Coca-Cola’s iconic 'Holidays Are Coming' ad is now a soulless and creepy dystopian nightmare made by AI

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  • Coca-Cola's UK TV ad campaign for the 2024 holiday season has launched
  • The iconic 'Holidays Are Coming' ad has been recreated using AI
  • Coca-Cola CMO Javiet Mexa says, "we want to bring Holidays Are Coming into the present."

Holidays are coming… but this time Coca-Cola has opted to strip the soul out of its iconic 1995 UK TV ad and use generative AI to recreate it.

The 16-second ad, which is set to run in the UK instead of the beloved original, has been entirely created using AI without any human input. The ad shows the famous Coca-Cola truck driving through a snow-covered landscape and arriving in a town, and Santa’s hand passing out bottles of the fizzy drink to happy people excited at the thought of the taste of Coca-Cola Zero Sugar.

Coca-Cola’s European CMO Javier Meza told Marketing Week, “We didn’t start by saying: ‘OK, we need to do this with AI'. The brief was, we want to bring Holidays Are Coming into the present, and then we explored AI as a solution to that.”

Interestingly, and unlike the original ad, Coca-Cola’s new AI version omits Santa’s face entirely. Whether this was intentional, or because AI’s recreation of Santa Claus was deemed too eerie, we’re not quite sure.

Meza added that Coca-Cola tested the AI-generated ad with consumers prior to release, and said they "loved" it, leading the multi-billion dollar company to push on with the idea.

Festive spirit generated by AI

The advert was generated using Coca-Cola’s own Real Magic AI, which was launched last year in collaboration with Bain & Company and OpenAI. The AI model combines the capabilities of OpenAI's GPT-4 and Dall-E, and learns from Coca-Cola’s creative assets created over the brand’s 138-year history.

The 'Create Real Magic' campaign from last year invited digital artists to use the AI model to create digital billboards for the brand, with the winners appearing in New York’s Times Square and London’s Piccadilly Circus. At the time, I don’t think anyone expected Coca-Cola to use the same technology for a TV ad, but then a lot has changed since March 2023, and now Coca-Cola wants to show that it’s evolving with the times.

AI can be incredibly useful and often magical, but many people – myself included – will feel that some things, like Coca-Cola’s cozy and magical holiday ad, should remain untouched by technology.

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