Coca-Cola’s soft drink empire is drawing intense backlash after releasing a new Christmas ad created entirely by AI.
Serving as a throwback to its 1995 “Holidays Are Coming” campaign, the ad sprang from generative AI and featured settings that were less than photo-realistic with characters who failed to rise above the uncanny valley.
Take a look:
Coca-Cola has used AI for their upcoming Christmas ad.
— TechHalla (@techhalla) November 15, 2024
This is a game-changer for generative AI. pic.twitter.com/TrdHOCvd8f
On YouTube, the ad garnered over 2.8k dislikes versus just 308 likes as of this writing along with overwhelmingly negative comments.
“Of course a company which earned 46 billion last year has the gall to resort to AI just to save a minute smidge of their profits. How tragic,” said one commenter.
“How could you Coca-Cola!? You promised people real quality Coca-Cola Christmas Truck Advert. But all I saw was… cheapy the cheapskate!” said another.
“Nothing embodies the generous Christmas spirit quite like cutting costs through heartless AI used in an attempt to please the shareholders,” added another.
According to Futurism, it marks “the company’s first fully AI-generated ad,” with Coca-Cola’s European chief marketing officer Javier Meza saying the decision to use AI stemmed from a desire to save time and money.
“We didn’t start by saying: ‘OK, we need to do this with AI,'” Meza told Marketing Week. “The brief was, we want to bring Holidays Are Coming into the present and then we explored AI as a solution to that.”
In June of last year, Disney faced serious backlash after it employed AI to create the opening credits for its new Disney+ Marvel series Secret Invasion, generating conversations about the future of artists in the industry. Speaking with Polygon, the show’s executive producer, Ali Selim, said that they worked with Method Studios to create the AI sequence, which became a back-and-forth collaboration.
“We would talk to them about ideas and themes and words, and then the computer would go off and do something. And then we could change it a little bit by using words, and it would change.” Selim said, calling the opening intro “explorative and inevitable, and exciting, and different.”
Paul Roland Bois directed the award-winning Christian tech thriller, EXEMPLUM, which has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes critic rating and can be viewed for FREE on YouTube, Tubi, or Fawesome TV. “Better than Killers of the Flower Moon,” wrote Mark Judge. “You haven’t seen a story like this before,” wrote Christian Toto. A high-quality, ad-free rental can also be streamed on Google Play, Vimeo on Demand, or YouTube Movies. Follow him on X @prolandfilms or Instagram @prolandfilms.
