For the second year in a row, Coca-Cola’s annual Christmas ad is AI-generated.
The soda company launched the ad on Monday just days after Halloween, shifting into the winter months with the annual “Holidays are coming” advertisement. Later that day, Coca-Cola released a making-of video, explaining how a mere team of five AI specialists was hired to sort through more than 70,000 clips in a 30-day span for the ad’s creation.
“That level of precision suggests the team had to go way beyond just simple prompting,” a voice in the footage says. “Shaping the animals, getting the texture right, those big sparkly eyes.”
The unidentified speakers in the video discuss the process of creating the AI-generated advertisement, which involved prompting for static images and then using image models to generate animation. From there, the team went through a post-production process involving “color tweaks and quick clean-up.”
“Post-production is the new pre-production. Advanced reasoning models let artists plan and solve them early, and making scenes feel real before production locks in,” one of the voices awkwardly adds. Viewers of the YouTube video questioned if the two unseen speakers were, like the commercial itself, AI-generated. You can watch the video for yourself below.
The ad is similar to last year’s, and the historical Coca-Cola Christmas spot, showing trucks delivering the cool beverage in a snowy landscape. One of the speakers described the look of the ad as “realistic,” with highly textured, computer-generated animals watching the trucks pass by.
The Coca-Cola ad has already faced criticism for its use of generative AI and scaling back of the creative team employed. Like last year, those critical of AI have taken the company — a massive worldwide brand — to task for the perceived cutting of corners.
Coca-Cola global VP and head of generative AI Pratik Thakar spoke to THR Monday about the ad, saying that he felt the “craftsmanship is ten times better” in this year’s ad, and that he believes this will yield a comparatively positive response.
“We understand that concern,” Thakar said. “But we need to keep moving forward and pushing the envelope.”
“The genie is out of the bottle,” he continued, “and you’re not going to put it back in.”
