Coca-Cola’s AI lead on the polarizing response to its holiday ads

Coca-Cola’s AI holiday campaign was met with polarizing responses, including headlines such as “Coca-Cola kills off Santa” from the U.K. Telegraph. Sure, the brand anticipated its commercials would spark a conversation, but it wasn’t a moment to mourn Christmas, according to Pratik Thakar, Coca-Cola’s VP and global head of generative AI. “It’s not about killing Santa, actually, it’s putting Santa front and center of a multilingual Santa experience,” Thakar said in a recent interview with Ad Age, following the initial burst of backlash to Coca-Cola’s holiday marketing. As part of Coca-Cola’s AI experimentation, the brand created an interactive, digital Santa that lives on its “Create Real Magic” website, where consumers could chat with Saint Nick in dozens of languages. There also were the three commercials, produced by three separate AI studios, that started the latest round of “to AI or not AI” in advertising circles. The ads were remakes of Coca-Cola’s 1995 classic “Holidays Are Coming,” kicking off the brand’s push for the next two months of Christmas-themed marketing. Below, a look at the AI Coca-Cola commercials from studios Secret Level, Silverside and The Wild Card, in that order: Coca-Cola’s marketing team has tried to emphasize that the AI-generated commercials were not a sign that AI is taking over all advertising. The technology has been predictably controversial, as members of the creative community fear it will take jobs or allow brands to cut corners, lending to less-inspired work. Backers of the technology are excited about how it could bring more creative tools to more people, more cheaply. Last week, one of the commercials premiered during Ad Age’s Emerging Tech Summit, which offered a workshop on the potential of AI video to reshape marketing. That has been an ongoing question: How advanced are AI models at creating videos. Also read: Reactions to Coca-Cola’s AI ads Since OpenAI’s ChatGPT showed the power of AI-generated text and platforms such as Midjourney showed the possibilities with image-generation over the last two years, video is the next dimension marketers are putting into their work. Coca-Cola’s ads, one of which (Silverside) is airing on TV in the U.S., showed that AI video can make commercial-quality work. At the same time, the technology still has kinks to work through, and the most vocal critics have gleefully pointed out flaws in Coca-Cola’s spots. The ads were from three major studios in the AI space, including Secret Level, Silverside AI and The Wild Card. To gauge how Coca-Cola is taking all the feedback, Ad Age talked with Thakar about the new campaign and what the brand has learned from the responses. Below is that conversation, edited for length and clarity. Coca-Cola obviously tests all its marketing, so what test process did this holiday campaign undergo? We did extensive research, actually, in North America and Europe, and it worked very well with consumers. It was very, very positive. It was crossing our threshold of success criteria. So that’s where we got super excited and still we are excited. So just to be very kind of straightforward, we are really proud of what we have done. We want to keep pushing the envelope. Consumers don’t really look at it like creative directors look at it. Consumers, if the story makes sense, and it entertains them, and it gives information, then it’s good. And that’s what we saw: Consumers were not concerned about AI versus non-AI. Why was AI right for this campaign? As you know, this is not our first AI [activation], we have done various initiatives, and we keep going. We know that the world has changed with AI, and we need to evolve. Now, it doesn’t mean that every project needs to be an AI project. In this case, this fantastical, this hyper-realistic kind of storyline needed the power of AI; that’s where you are using the technology’s strength to take the story to the next level. Tomorrow, if we create an ad with a family drinking Coca-Cola and sharing a meal, we may not use AI. With that, we just need to do it in the normal, traditional way, where we film with all real humans. And this is one thing, too, where we have not been able to tell our story to the larger world about this holiday campaign. The people you see in the film [from Secret Level studio], they are real people. The music you hear, that's real music. It's real music, and we composed that three times for three different films. We composed it three times in three different ways with three different teams. So, even those commercials, creatives are at the decision-making table. Creative makes decisions. Our human creatives make decisions and use AI as a tool. What are some of the misconceptions out there, do you think, about AI? Some of the reaction is from people thinking that we press a button and a film comes out, and that’s not the reality. People still need to do VFX (visual effects), and it requires work. That is the real human creativity. So, from the reaction perspective, yes, there’s a lot of polarized reactions happening on both sides. What we have seen is a trend, where a particular sector is commenting in a more concerned way, or from a more nervous side [regarding AI]. Then there is a sector, which is more kind of tech savvy, pushing for more innovation and entrepreneurship, and that segment is looking at AI as an inflection point. Have you changed anything about your media plan based on the reactions to the commercials? The world is not going to go back to the past, right? It’s like with CGI. We used CGI and we created the polar bears [the famous computer-generated polar bears from 1993], and at that time it was new technology. Now, it's AI, and we need to keep doing that. We need to keep pushing the envelope and staying ahead. So as a company, we are very much committed, and we are proud of what we have put together. We want to hear everyone's perspective. We don’t want to ignore anyone, and we’re a very humble company. At Coca-Cola, we have to listen to everyone, but then we need to keep focus on what is the future, and how we need to build things. Given some of the negative responses, is there anything you would have done differently with this campaign? Maybe we could have told this story much more in advance, with a larger group of reporters and journalists and media outlets before launching it—maybe that. We need to tell the story properly, because we have the standalone Santa experience on our website, where you talk to Santa. And there is an ecosystem of different marketing tools—there is our Christmas packaging and our Christmas caravan across the world, which are on-ground activations. There is another film, which is a traditionally short, real, nice film. So there is a huge, synchronized program, and it will run that way. We are very much going ahead with everything as planned. No changes.

Coca-Cola’s AI lead on the polarizing response to its holiday ads

Featured Stories