Generative AI Is Here to Ruin Christmas

Despite the controversy surrounding its use of generative AI to create a trio of Christmas advertisements last year, Coca-Cola has once again returned to the world’s driest well, churning out yet another terrible AI-generated advertisement.

Coca-Cola’s iconic annual Christmas advertising campaigns date back nearly a century, and are a mainstay of the holiday season for many. The company’s 2020 Christmas ad was particularly well received at a time when people were reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic, and recreated the company’s iconic 1995 ad featuring a Christmas-themed caravan of Coca-Cola trucks bringing holiday cheer to a wintry wonderland.

However, 2024’s AI-generated recreation of its iconic 1995 ad filled some with discomfort rather than Christmas cheer. The short 15-second version looks terrible, essentially making all of the existing, human-created ideas featured in prior Coca-Cola ads look worse and unnatural. The “people” in the ad are based on actual human actors, which does little to make them appear more natural. It is, frankly, a mess devoid of any of the humanity that makes Christmas actually mean anything.

This year’s version, which yet again recreates the classic Coca-Cola truck caravan charging through a winter landscape, is decidedly better from a technological standpoint, built on significantly improved generative AI video technology. 2025’s advertisement is more realistic-looking, which arguably makes it all the more discomforting.

As The Wall Street Journal reports, this new ad was made by two different AI studios, Silverside and Secret Level, both of which worked on 2024’s campaign.

This year’s ad includes a wide variety of animals, some cartoonish and others realistic. For some reason, the ad features sloths, seals, and porcupines in addition to Coca-Cola’s iconic polar bears and penguins. The classic trucks sometimes quickly carry their soda, and other times drive at a snail’s pace down the middle of the road — snails are one of few animals not jammed into the 60-second ad. From start to finish, the spot feels disjointed and chaotic, which is perhaps a relatable holiday vibe for many.

Perhaps most disconcerting of all is the final splash screen, which plasters “Coca-Cola. Real Magic,” in front of a very unreal Christmas scene.

Coca-Cola refused to tell The Wall Street Journal how much the campaign cost, but the company’s Chief Marketing Officer, Manolo Arroyo, noted that it cost less and was faster to produce than a non-AI commercial. Coca-Cola says it only needed five people to build this year’s ad, so at least there’s that. No need to worry about all those pesky directors, producers, artists, visual effects specialists, and actors doing work. For what it’s worth, Coca-Cola measures its annual profits in billions of dollars.

“The core of this, the engine of this, is human storytellers,” Arroyo tells Wall Street Journal.

Although the general public, somehow, didn’t hate Coca-Cola’s AI ad in 2024, the campaign did not sit well at all with creative professionals. Alex Hirsch, an artist who created the critically acclaimed television series, Gravity Falls, wrote last year in response to Coca-Cola’s AI Christmas campaign that the Coca-Cola “is ‘red’ because it’s made from the blood of out-of-work artists.” It’s a safe bet Hirsch won’t feel any different about this year’s ad, even if the trucks’ wheels are actually spinning this time around.

If companies can save money and time by assigning creative work to AI, you can bet your bottom dollar that they will. Although television commercials designed to sell soft drinks are not sacred, Coca-Cola’s ads are arguably cultural touchstones for people and do, in fact, matter. That clearly won’t protect them from the uninspired, artificial hand of AI, which may or may have all its fingers.