One of Coca-Cola’s three new AI-produced holiday commercials received an early screening at Ad Age’s Emerging Tech Summit on Tuesday, demonstrating how video AI has reached the TV screen. The ads mark the beverage brand’s first extensive use of generative AI in creating a TV campaign. The commercials are an update to Coca-Cola’s classic “Holidays Are Coming” spot from 1995, but instead of needing to film in snowy climates, the production was done with the help of sophisticated AI models.

Coca-Cola worked with three AI studios—Secret Level, Silverside AI and The Wild Card—to make three versions of the commercial that will run globally across TV, connected TVs and digital video. Secret Level Founder Jason Zada joined Ad Age’s Emerging Tech Summit to share his studio’s take on the holiday ad and talk about the AI tech behind the scenes.

“We worked alongside Coca-Cola to re-imagine … ‘Holidays Are Coming,’ the super-iconic holiday ad,” said Zada. “And the challenge was to basically create a fully generative AI TV [commercial] out of it.”

Below is the first look at the commercials from Secret Level, Silverside and The Wild Card, in that order:

Also read: Creatives and consumers reacts to the Coca-Cola spots

Earlier this week, Coca-Cola announced that it had used generative AI, which creates text, images, audio and video through large language models, for its holiday ad production. Coca-Cola also built a new generative AI experience, accessible via QR codes on Coke cans, leading consumers to a virtual Santa Claus. The QR code opens the “Create Real Magic” site that Coca-Cola launched last year, which was a central part of its first major generative AI marketing activation. The site initially allowed people to generate holiday-themed post cards with Coca-Cola’s Christmas iconography, but now people can chat with the virtual Santa to help create more holiday images to share on social media.

“We keep our roots in our heritage and what Coke is all about as a brand, but then connect the dots with the future and technology,” said Pratik Thakar, Coca-Cola’s VP and global head of generative AI, “and that was kind of a starting point [for the commercials].”

Watch: How emerging tech is reshaping marketing

‘It changes everything’

Coca-Cola has a long history of pushing the envelope with new technologies, such as in 1993 when it created its computer-generated polar bears. And Coca-Cola has been one of the brands leaning into AI as a core part of marketing. Coca-Cola also is a famous holiday advertiser, known for popularizing modern concepts of the red-suited Santa Claus. In 1995, Coke’s “Holidays Are Coming” ad (below) aired for the first time, which showed a convoy of Christmas-bedazzled trucks coming to a small town. The AI version has a similar feel, although all the creative was generated by AI.

The ad was “borrowing from the original, in terms of tonality and musically, but able to re-imagine it for a whole new generation,” Zada said.

Coca-Cola primarily uses AI models Leonardo, Luma and Runway, Thakar said. But there are more than a dozen “big video models,” with more coming online, including OpenAI’s Sora and Minimax, Zada said.

To show how quickly the space is evolving, Zada said that the Secret Level team had been working on the Coca-Cola commercial for about a month when a new model, Kling, came out. Kling became integral to the ad. “When a new model comes out and you look at running some of your old shots through it, all of a sudden it changes everything,” Zada said.

Kling was good at making human motion more realistic, Zada said. The AI-generated holiday commercial starts with a sweeping shot of a snowed-in town, closeups of cute animals, including polar bears, emerging from a wintry forest, and then a closeup of a classic Coke bottle being opened. It continues with the familiar Coca-Cola trucks barreling down snowed-in highways to reach town. Even the people in the spot are AI-generated, and it ends with Santa, face unseen, emerging from his truck to get handed a soda bottle from the townsfolk.

The two other spots, from Silverside and The Wild Card, have similar themes and feature furry animals, but those ones did not depict humans. For Secret Level’s spot, all the people were based on real actors, with permission to use their likenesses in AI, Thakar said. The “Holidays Are Coming” soundtrack was recorded with real musicians and singers, Thakar said.

The pace of change in AI video creation is happening so fast that glitches and wonky aspects to previous models are starting to get smoothed out, according to Zada. The process is still not perfect, Zada said. For instance, there was an opening shot in the commercial with an AI-generated squirrel, which took multiple attempts to get right, Zada said. “We must have run that squirrel [through AI] in the beginning of that video a couple hundred times,” Zada said.

Also read: The best holiday ads of 2024

Critic’s chilly reception

The use of AI in advertising has become a hotly debated subject, with creative purists on one end decrying the invasion of machine-made work. Some brands have faced backlashes for their AI commercials, including Under Armour and Toys R Us. This year, the Super Bowl advertiser behind the “He Gets Us” commercials, which used images of Jesus, received heat because some people thought it was made by AI when it wasn’t. That example could show that the public is particularly sensitive to seeing AI depict traditional figures, such as Jesus.

Also read: How AI in ads divides consumers

Coca-Cola’s first AI-generated commercial could add to the conversation around the use of the technology in advertising. Joe Foley, editor at design and art site Creative Bloq, wrote a post title, “I’m shocked that Coca-Cola remade its iconic Christmas ad with AI.” Foley had seen Coca-Cola promoting one of the new commercials on its Brazil Instagram account.

“No matter how massively AI video has improved in recent months, it still looks weird (and cheap),” Foley wrote.

Zada of Secret Level likely would agree that the commercial was cheaper, because in fact, it does save money. “It would be, you know, several million dollars and a lot of time in the cold” to shoot the commercial live, Zada said, “and we were able to do all of that, you know, from the comfort of everyone's home, we have global artists all over the world that we worked with.”

As for the creativity aspect, Zada said people are still integral to the process. “I think a lot of people feel like you just press a button, and you get something like that [Coca-Cola commercial] out,” Zada said. “And I think that it's so much of the human side of it that makes that warmth that you see in that spot.”

For Coca-Cola, using AI for the holiday ads was not about cost savings, but about doing more creatively, Thakar said. Also, it wasn’t a sign that Coca-Cola was trying to turn all its commercial work into AI productions. “More than cost, it’s the speed,” Thakar said. “Speed is I would say five times, right? And that is a huge benefit. The production time would have taken, traditionally, much longer. So that is a huge benefit.”

“And then you can do more, more variety, and more customized and more personalized,” Thakar said. “And that’s the way to go, with resources, rather than doing less and spending less.”