Coca-Cola has brought back its famous “Holidays Are Coming” vibe for 2025, but this time the festive magic is powered by generative AI. The response? Mixed at best. A lot of viewers are calling it awkward and a bit of an eyesore, and it’s not hard to see why.
What the ad looks like
Instead of trying to make realistic people, Coke went all-in on animals: polar bears, a panda, a sloth, and a bunch of other critters. Styles jump around from semi-realistic to cartoony, and the movement can feel flat and odd, like 2D cut-outs nudged across the screen rather than properly animated characters. On the plus side, the iconic red trucks finally have wheels that actually turn this year. Progress, however small.
Why the criticism
We’re in a world where AI video tools are getting scarily good, and that makes the bar higher. Compared with the slick deepfake-style clips we now see from leading models, Coca-Cola’s spot looks dated and uneven. It’s also arriving after Coke caught flak in 2024 for earlier AI holiday ads that featured uncanny faces and weird physics, so the scrutiny was always going to be intense.
Who made it
Coca-Cola worked with AI studios Silverside and Secret Level, with around 100 people involved overall. Five AI specialists reportedly prompted and refined more than 70,000 AI video clips to assemble the final cut. That’s a lot of material for a single commercial and shows how manual AI production still is behind the scenes.
Speed and cost
According to reporting referenced by The Verge, Coke’s chief marketing officer says AI made the campaign cheaper and much faster to produce. What once took about a year can now be turned around in roughly a month. That speed is clearly a big reason brands are experimenting so heavily with AI, even if the creative results are inconsistent.
Honestly, the outrage over this ad feels a bit overblown. It’s Coca-Cola, not Pixar. I doubt the point was to make a “perfectly rendered” holiday short - more to keep the Holidays Are Coming vibe alive while testing faster creative cycles.
From a production standpoint, shaving a full-year timeline down to a month is huge. Anyone who’s managed real marketing budgets knows that kind of turnaround is massive for a global brand. The fact that it took 70,000 clips to get there actually proves how immature AI video still is - and how forward-thinking Coke was to even attempt it at that scale.
People can nitpick the art style all they want, but this is what iteration looks like. The first iPhone camera was trash, too, but it changed the market. Same story here. Brands willing to look a little “awkward” in public today will own the playbook tomorrow.
If anything, the ad’s a glimpse of what happens when big brands stop waiting for perfection and start shipping fast. That’s a lesson more marketers (and honestly, more founders) could stand to learn.
@jordysg I agree with you on the iteration point. That’s what caught my attention too.
To me, the story isn’t the bears or the style choices. It’s that Coca-Cola managed to pull off a global campaign in a month instead of a year. That kind of turnaround shows how much faster creative work is getting when AI becomes part of the process.
For smaller teams like mine, the lesson is simple: it’s not about making something perfect, it’s about how many times you can test and tweak before lunch.
What I’m curious about is how they kept the brand tone consistent with so many clips stitched together. We’ve tried AI-assisted content in my day job, and quality control becomes the real challenge once you speed things up.
So while the ad looks rough in places, it feels like an early step toward something bigger. The visuals will improve. The process is what’s really changing.