How Coca-Cola is making AI fears part of its new campaign

Coca-Cola’s enthusiasm for AI in advertising jumps into the script of its newest ad. Breaking today, “Westside’s Finest” examines 50 years of Coca-Cola’s beverage brands through the lens of a family-run convenience store. The time-traveling creative likens the uneasiness surrounding AI in 2025 to the overblown fears of the computer in 1975. “We’re going to be alright,” characters in both eras conclude. It’s a point of view the beverage giant happens to share. Coca-Cola has been a pioneer in AI marketing, including most recently remaking classic Christmas ads entirely with AI—a project that drew mixed reception from an advertising community worried about the implications of AI on the creative arts. Exclusive for Ad Age All Access subscribers: See profile of Coca-Cola including ad spending and marketing spending over time But “Westside” is not meant to be a response to critics, company executives say. The ad, which shows off Coca-Cola’s beverage brand portfolio and multigenerational appeal to kick off the new selling year, uses technology as a storytelling framework, visiting milestones including the cellphone, the credit card and the computer. “This is not a commentary on AI. It’s a commentary on what’s going on culture, the evolution of culture, and that is how we’re getting that story across,” Alex Ames, senior director of content and creative excellence, Coca-Cola North America, said in an interview. The only AI used in “Westside’s Finest” is on the back end, where the brand will use AI and machine learning to serve programmatic ads related to the campaign, said Shakir Moin, president, marketing, Coca-Cola North America. Ad Age Tech Power List 2025 We’re looking for top digital innovators from agencies, brands, platforms, ad tech companies and tech startups Enter here Proud Sponsors “Westside’s Finest” is the second installment of what Coke calls the “Proud Sponsors” campaign, which has used Hollywood talent to create branded entertainment around Coca-Cola’s entire beverage portfolio, producing a range of customizable content meant to kick off Coke’s marketing year. Last year’s entry, known as “The New Guy,” was made in partnership with the showrunner of the hit FX television drama “The Bear,” reinterpreting a scene from that show as a setting for the ad. For “Westside’s Finest,” Coke recruited “Black-ish” creator Kenya Barris, who directs and appears in the ad. The cast of “Westside” includes Lionel Boyce (who plays Marcus Brooks on “The Bear”) along with Lauren London, Omari Hardwick and Nelson Franklin. Barris appears alongside his real-life family, wife Rainbow, and children Kass and Bronx. Agencies involved in “Westside” include Majority, WPP Open X, Prettybird, UTA and CMC Forecast. The soundtrack is “Caravan of Love” by Isley-Jasper-Isley. Also read: Coca-Cola exec on response to its AI holiday ads “Proud sponsors” refers to a range of evolving taglines for the ads. The “Westside” ad is built around the notion of “Proud sponsors of then, now and always.” Other expressions of the campaign can use other phrases, such as “Proud sponsors of the usual,” accompanying a snippet of a customer waiting to use a soda fountain. The ad will be featured in two-minute, 60-second, 30-second, 15-second and six-second versions that will appear across platforms including linear TV, paid digital and social, organic social, PR, out-of-home and experiential. Moin said the media buy would be “predominantly” digital and social, with some linear TV like live sports programming. Throwbacks Before “The New Guy” last year, Coca-Cola had been reticent to feature multiple brands in a single ad, said Moin, “because consumers honestly didn’t care that a number of brands come from a company X.” That could change if Coke gathered the brands into a context where they’d make sense together—the crowded family party shown in “The New Guy,” or in a convenience store in “Westside’s Finest,” he said. The wealth of brands gave creators freedom to pursue a richer and more authentic story than they could within the confines of a single brand, Moin added. And the 50-year timespan provided lots of feel-good throwbacks to retired or retrenched brands such as New Coke, Tab, Mr. Pibb and Mello Yello, along with moments of vintage Coke advertising, such as the 1970s jingle “I’d like to teach the world to sing.” “What we’re starting to do more and more, is to ensure that if a brand exists, that it’s got to have a purpose, got to have a reason,” Moin said. “And we’re now finding wonderful pockets of growth for our full portfolio. There are certain pockets where Pibb has high resonance. How do we activate and ensure that the brand is leveraged even more than we have done in the past?” Programmatic learning As it did with the “The New Guy,” Coca-Cola intends to use pieces of the “Westside” in programmatic ads served to individual customers or customer clusters—but will get by with much fewer than the 40,000 individual ads assembled last year for the same initiative. Those ads, which were created by mixing and matching various brands, offers and messages, resulted in less uptake than executives had hoped for. “Of the things I’ve really appreciated about our marketing transformation effort is truly feeling free to fail,” said Ames, who estimated this year’s programmatic content would be closer to 1,000 ads than to 40,000. “I think what we learned last year is a lot of the pairings just didn’t work. So we learned from that … and we’re focusing our efforts on the creative that is going to move a consumer to an action.” Coca-Cola remains a firm believer in programmatic advertising, even as it continues to seek the right balance of volume and performance. “Serving one message to all of America is lazy; it doesn't make sense,” Moin said. “Ideally, every message should be customized, but that raises cost and ineffectiveness to a level which we can’t manage at the moment. So the right answer is somewhere in the middle.” Goosebumps Coca-Cola’s carbonated soft drinks portfolio volume rose 0.5% through the first nine months of 2024, outperforming declines at both PepsiCo (-2.8%) and Keurig Dr Pepper (-0.9%) during the same period, Beverage Digest figures show. That success stems in part from a revamped marketing strategy that has put the company’s efforts behind fewer and larger events—seven or eight big initiatives a year vs. the 300 smaller projects it might once have undertaken, Moin said. Coca-Cola’s big marketing events in 2024 included the “Proud Sponsors” kickoff; college football and March Madness programs; a holiday effort; and a collaboration with Marvel Comics, in addition to a Sprite relaunch and a Halloween Fanta campaign. “Having fewer moments and doing them wonderfully was important,” Moin said. Sharper storytelling has also made a difference, Moin said, attributing that in part to establishing a recurring meeting of brand creative leads known as “Goosebumps” styled as collaborative, open discussions. A better ability to attribute media to outcomes—like customer recruitment and sales—has also made a difference for Coca-Cola, as has a new marketing training program known as Spark, Moin said.

How Coca-Cola is making AI fears part of its new campaign

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