Coca-Cola's AI Holiday Bet: Speed vs. Soul
Coca-Cola leaned hard into artificial intelligence for the second straight year, dropping AI-generated "Holidays Are Coming" ads as the season kicked off in early November 2025. The result: massive reach, faster production, and a heated debate about what makes holiday work feel human.
For creatives, this is the stress test. Can AI carry a brand's most emotional moment of the year without breaking trust-or the illusion?
Quick facts
- AI-generated holiday ads launched in early November 2025; second consecutive year using generative tech
- Multiple spots: reimagined scenes, anthropomorphic characters, and a fresh take on the 1995 classic
- "Holidays Are Coming" remake produced by WPP Open X and VML
- Common critiques: "soulless," "creepy," and emotionally thin; controversy spiked across social
What changed: AI compressed the timeline
According to trade coverage, the AI remake took roughly one month-work that could have dragged to a year with traditional pipelines. That's a new speed ceiling for big-budget seasonal campaigns.
The team framed it as AI-powered storytelling layered with familiar craft. Translation: use models to accelerate exploration and production while keeping brand guardrails, music, and editorial polish intact.
Strategy and positioning
The 2025 theme-"Refresh Your Holidays"-spotlights behind-the-scenes givers. Alongside the AI spots, Coca-Cola ran more traditional, memory-driven films and kept the truck tours rolling worldwide through November and December.
Creative explored winter vignettes, nostalgic cues, and fantastical visual worlds delivering the iconic beverage. It's a blend of heritage and new tools-familiar melody, new wrapper.
Backlash, glitches, and mixed sentiment
Social reactions went hard on the uncanny valley. Words like "soulless" and "creepy" trended, with calls for boycotts showing up in comments and reposts.
Coverage pointed to technical artifacts too-like truck wheels that seemed to glide, not roll. Even so, one data cut showed 61% positive sentiment, suggesting the audience isn't one note; it's split by taste, age, and tolerance for experimentation.
Read this as a creative playbook, not a headline
- Hybrid pipeline wins: Use AI for concept boards, set/scene variations, background plates, and alt story paths. Keep live-action for faces, hands, liquids, and hero shots.
- Define your "emotion budget": Spend real time and money where the feeling lives-music, casting, VO, edit rhythm, and final color. AI doesn't fix a flat read.
- Bulletproof QA for physics: Wheels roll, snow falls, breath condenses, eye lines lock. Run a frame-by-frame checklist for motion, reflections, specular highlights, and limb continuity.
- Style bible first: Lock palette, lensing, composition rules, character design, and typography. Fine-tune prompts and negative prompts against that bible before you scale outputs.
- Human in the loop: Assign a creative editor to curate generations, stitch story, and kill anything uncanny-even if it's "cool." Your job is feeling, not novelty.
- Test early, not loud: Pre-test cuts with small panels. Look for recall, warmth, and replay intent-not just click-through. If warmth drops, go back to live-action inserts.
- Narrative clarity beats spectacle: A simple, familiar story arc will carry more weight than AI flourish. Especially during the holidays.
- Have a fallback: Ship an emotion-forward cut that can run if social sentiment dips. Don't bet the season on one experimental execution.
A one-month AI + live-action workflow that actually ships
- Week 1: Brief, mood, and storyboards. Generate look exploration, environment plates, and character studies. Lock music direction early.
- Week 2: Previz with AI animatics. Identify hero shots for live-action pickup. Build a QA checklist from known AI failure modes.
- Week 3: Shoot hero elements (hands, faces, product, practical snow, close-ups). Record VO. Start edit with temp grade and sound design.
- Week 4: Composite AI plates with live-action. Run physics and continuity QA. Social-test alt cuts. Final color, mix, and brand review.
What to measure (so the debate isn't just vibes)
- Warmth and nostalgia lift vs. prior year baselines
- Completion rate, replay rate, and save/share ratio on social
- Frame-level defect rate (hands, eyes, motion, reflections)
- Cost and cycle time saved vs. change in brand sentiment
- Incremental reach gained from versioning at scale
The bigger question for holiday work
This season shows the tension clearly: speed and scale on one side, emotional truth on the other. The audience forgives a lot-except feeling nothing.
Use AI like a multiplier for exploration and versioning. But protect the heart of the story with human craft. If a scene risks the uncanny valley, earn the moment with real faces, real motion, and real sound.
Level up your AI production chops
If you're building a hybrid pipeline for 2025 campaigns, sharpen your process and tool stack. Browse practical AI courses for creative roles at Complete AI Training or scan new releases here: Latest AI Courses.
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