Coca-Cola Ad Panned As Soulless AI-Generated Slop But Is It Really That Bad?

Christmas commercials tend to fill us with the spirit of giving, joy, hope, family, and a large dose of the feel-good factor. Among others, Coca-Cola, a mega-popular brand (so popular, in fact, that scammers targeted it along with McDonald's for a phishing campaign a couple of years ago) has been known for many famous commercials that do just that, but 2024's AI-generated iteration might have Santa seriously wonder if the marketing team for the pop company has been naughty or nice. The ad is so bad and artificial that it has understandably put off a lot of viewers.

Ah, 'tis the season... to take a long-loved tradition of making holiday commercials that bring warmth to one's heart and doing a complete 180. As you can see from the 15-second short above, the message is STILL there, but it's been largely subjugated by the AI-generated sets, props, and "people". We have no problems with AI content as long as it's done right, and are not the kind of deepfakes that YouTube is cracking down on). However, the ad above looks like something produced by budding students than by professional artists.

In an interview, Javier Meza, CMO of Coca-Cola of Europe, described how the decision came to be. He said that, "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."

The production looks like a few short experiments snipped together rather than a proper final product, and it shows. Based on what netizens' reactions so far, Meza might have to go back to the drawing board. Reactions have been largely negative, ranging from "embarrassing", "slop", "creepy", with many calling out the irony of the final scene's "Real Magic" tagline. 

It's odd to us that of all the times of the year, Coca-Cola decided that a high-profile Christmas ad would be the perfect time to show how it can modernize. At the very least the multi-billion dollar company could've done some A-B testing to gauge people's reactions before such embarrassing content was made public, right?

What do you think of the ad? Is it as bad as keyboard warriors make it sound? All said, we hope other big brands don't follow suit this year. Pepsi, we're looking at you with your LED billboard built into a can.