Every few weeks, the world comes together, joins hands... and decides to hate on the same ad campaign.
Back in May it was the Apple spot that symbolized human creativity being crushed and compacted in a machine. Now, it’s Coca-Cola’s reboot of a holiday campaign from 1995, using AI to generate all of the video footage.
Opinion was mixed, at first, with Ad Age hinting that it “may be evidence the technology is capable of turning out TV-quality ads.” A few days later, the publication had a different summation of the public’s reaction: “AI-Powered Holiday Ad Earns Coca-Cola a Lump of Coal.”
It’s easy to hypothesize why these spots caused such consternation. If you’re old enough to have fond memories of the mid-’90s originals, it undoubtedly feels uncanny, or even gross, to see that warm-and-fuzzy imagery reactivated with AI. (Hey, maybe adorable cats and dogs that aren’t real just freak you out.)
And for creatives and marketers who despised these spots, part of the animosity may be linked to job insecurity: “If AI can ‘direct’ a major holiday campaign, does that mean I’ll be laid off by 2025?”
“All the comments from directors and producers feel defensive to me,” opines SmartAssets founder and CEO Lindsay Hong. “Consumers don’t look so critically. It’s really not much different from the historic ads—I’m sure my kids wouldn’t notice it was made by AI, just as I never thought about how the content was created when I saw the ads of the ‘90s.”
Coca-Cola is “a very strong brand” with “lots of historical content to train its AI on, making it more likely to get a good outcome,” Hong says.
But in the end, all this focus on the quality of the AI-produced ad may be besides the point. GenAI’s ability to create plausible video footage from scratch is arguably at the advanced novelty stage right now, but GenAI is undeniably changing the landscape for marketers in myriad ways, albeit more behind-the-scenes.
Case in point: SmartAssets itself, which uses GenAI to tag assets, predict future performance, and break longer videos down into discrete scenes, in order to track the emotional arc of a spot.
“The conversation around whether this Coca-Cola AI ad is good or terrible is all about what GenAI can do for production, which is just a small part of the pie,” Hong says.
“AI can also provide insights on ads that humans created, of course—providing key insights on emotional engagement and memorability which are extremely valuable, irrespective of the method used to produce the ads themselves.”
While it’s easy to hate on the uncanny valley of Coca-Cola’s holiday campaign, it’s important to remember that GenAI has already transformed business-as-usual for marketers—even if AI-created video is still a lackluster gift.
