Dear readers,
Today I'm going to tell you the story of how a company with a £5 billion annual advertising budget decided that the magic of Christmas could be generated by an algorithm. Spoiler alert: it worked! Or maybe not. It depends who you ask.
Christmas 1995 (when everything was real)
It was 1995 when Coca-Cola launched “Holidays Are Coming”, the advert that for thirty years has marked the beginning of Christmas for 44% of British consumers. Illuminated red lorries driving through snowy landscapes, hypnotic music, and that feeling of nostalgia as warm as a woollen blanket.
It was all real: real lorries, real snow (probably), real actors smiling and holding real bottles. The original scored a maximum of 5.9 stars on System1's Test Your Ad platform, achieved by only 1% of adverts.
Christmas 2024 (when everything became... strange)
Fast forward to November 2024. Coca-Cola decides to remake the advert. But this time with AI. Completely. 100%.
Three AI studios (Secret Level, Silverside AI and Wild Card) and four generative models to recreate the magic. The result? A video that NBC News describes as “soulless” and “devoid of any actual creativity”. The truck wheels turned in random directions (when they turned at all). The human faces looked like something out of a surreal nightmare.
Alex Hirsch, creator of Gravity Falls, commented: ‘Coca-Cola is red because it's made from the blood of out-of-work artists’. As subtle as a brick, as effective as a viral bomb.
Christmas 2025 (when they redid everything again)
This year, Coca-Cola is trying again. Same song, same trucks, but this time no humans. Just cute animals (easier to generate with AI, facial expressions are less complex) and a Santa Claus taken from Haddon Sundblom's 1931 historical archives.
Pratik Thakar, Coca-Cola's Global VP and Head of Generative AI, claims that the improvement is ‘10 times better’ than in 2024. He adds the phrase that sums up this whole mess: ‘The genie is out of the bottle and you're not going to put it back in.’
The numbers that create the paradox
While X exploded with indignation, Kantar ranked the 2024 AI advert as the best performing Christmas advert globally for the year.
Yes, you read that right.
The “soulless” advert, the one with the randomly spinning wheels, beat ALL other Christmas adverts. Including those with real actors, real crews and real emotions.
Coca-Cola used AI to remake the world's most iconic Christmas advert. Twitter tore it apart. Consumers loved it. Kantar crowned it #1 globally.
This is the new marketing: everyone argues about X, no one looks at the numbers.
The real cost (which no one wants to admit)
Manolo Arroyo, CMO of Coca-Cola, says that it used to take a year to produce a commercial like this. Now it takes about a month.
Production team: from 50+ people to 20 AI specialists.
But here's the twist: in the end, it costs pretty much the same.
How? 100 people work on 70,000 AI-generated clips to select the best ones. Pratik Thakar is clear: ‘It's our biggest business opportunity of the year. Would you want to cut costs? No, at least not at Coca-Cola.’
The savings are not in money. They are in time. From a year to a month. And in the Christmas campaign war, speed is everything.
The lesson for businesses (and disguised good wishes)
Coca-Cola can afford this experiment because it has over a century of Christmas brand equity. Consumers forgive the uncanny valley because they see the red trucks and their brains click = Christmas, regardless of how those pixels were generated.
But what about normal companies? Forrester warns: most brands don't have this kind of accumulated emotional capital.
And here come our Christmas greetings disguised as insights:
AI can replicate everything except context - Coca-Cola itself launched an interactive experience with a conversational AI Santa (OpenAI + Leonardo.ai + Microsoft) that worked BETTER than the commercials because the expectation was different.
Transparency matters less than effectiveness - Consumers often don't notice AI if it's not declared, and sometimes they don't even see it when it is declared.
Creatives and consumers live in parallel universes - While the former cry sacrilege, the latter show “delighted” responses when they don't know it's AI.
In conclusion (and here comes the plot twist)
Coca-Cola chose to use AI for the most sacred time of the year, the one that has defined their brand for 93 years. And it worked.
Not because AI is perfect. Not because creatives have stopped crying sacrilege. But because consumers - real ones, not those on X - simply don't care how those pixels were generated, if those pixels remind them of Christmas.
Creatives fought for authenticity. Pepsi won Twitter. Coca-Cola won where it mattered.
Perhaps Thakar is right: ‘The genie is out of the bottle and it's not going back in.’
Happy holidays to all of you.
See you again in 2026.
Fabio Lauria
CEO & Founder, ELECTE
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