Coca-Cola's new holiday ads are proof that AI isn't ready for this shit yet
Can you feel it? That crisp chill in the air. The early-setting sun. The crunching leaves beneath your feet. The sound of a Coca-Cola Christmas jingle, backing yet another ad that leans way into the red-and-white-ness of Coca-Cola — say, aren’t those Santa Claus’s colors? — to remind you that Christmas is Cokemas. Pop a top again.
It’s been this way for nearly 100 years, since the company contracted artist Haddon Sundblom to paint jolly old St. Nick for its advertisements. Sundblom’s Clause became so synonymous with the character that, according to a Coca-Cola webpage about the history of these paintings, people would write (presumably angry) letters if anything about Santa changed from one image to the next. Lest you think the internet and shit like comic books brought that out in people, here’s the sort of thing that could prompt these letters:
People loved the Coca‑Cola Santa images and paid such close attention to them that when anything changed, they sent letters to The Coca‑Cola Company. One year, Santa's large belt was backwards (perhaps because Sundblom was painting via a mirror). Another year, Santa Claus appeared without a wedding ring, causing fans to write asking what happened to Mrs. Claus.
So maybe it’s not surprising that people are once again upset, according to IGN and others, about Coca-Cola’s newest batch of AI-created holiday advertisements. The ads are based on a concept the company has milked since the 90s that sees dozens of red 18-wheelers driving through snowy mountain roads to bring, uh, way too much soda to small town America. Here’s what seems to be the first one (Don’t mind the year in the video’s title; the video’s description lists the probably-more-correct year of 1995):
Watching that video, all I could think was, “Fuck, so much work went into that.” Just considering the trucks on their own — someone had to put all those lights on the dang things! And thanks to some really solid cinematography and great actors, it’s a good ad, even if the premise is pretty stupid.
Coca-Cola has recycled versions of this concept for its holiday ads over and over since then. Have a look at this one from 2020:
Again, this ad obviously involved a lot of work. And it’s again really absurd, yet effective. The dad going on this wild Indiana Jones-style adventure to get his daughter’s letter to living being Santa Claus, only to be picked up by a Coca-Cola truck driver who drops him off… somewhere. We learn, as he opens the letter, that his daughter had asked Santa for one thing: to bring her dad home for Christmas.
It’s at that moment that I started to tear up, and look: the ad is ridiculous, but as both a father of a little girl and the son of a truck driver, I feel the ending of that commercial deep in my soul. Also, I cry at movies a lot. Do you know anyone who cried while watching Darren Aronofsky’s Noah? Now you do.
My point is that Coca-Cola has made some really impactful holiday ads over the years, filled with real people, sure, and I would assert that a lot of the reason for that is that everything you see in each of these ads was the result of a decision, however cursory or deeply planned, made directly by a human being. That’s true if it’s a real set: Someone picked the trucks they used; wardrobe picked each article of clothing for the actors; members of the crew chose where to place lights and cameras for filming. Even if the commercial uses CGI, every asset in the commercial was hand-crafted or chosen by the artists who then animated it.
You can sort of approach that kind of detail with AI, but you don’t really have to. And even if you try, you’ll never be making the number of choices that go into the older ways of producing a video commercial. Case in point, take a look at the first of this year’s batch of ads:
It starts out weird from the very first few seconds, as Santa cracks open a cold one. Notice how loosely he holds the bottle opener, how even though he’s holding it at the proper angle for levering the cap off, he tilts the opener sideways instead. How the steam is enveloping his fingers before he even gets the top off. How unnaturally the bottle cap turns in his fingers. And, if you watch this again in the video above, how disconnected the bottle-opening noise is from what we see onscreen:
Then, immediately afterward, this awkward moment where Santa, I guess, is supposed to push this toy truck, but instead it just drives away—on unmoving wheels—as he sets it down. Then the lights come on and Santa’s hand pokes the little toy town for no reason:
After that, you get a shot of a truck driving by, then a bunch of animals reacting to the sight of it. The animals are whatever. They look like cheap, generic CGI creatures. But the next thing I noticed is just a series of awkward inconsistencies. Like the fact that the lights on the trucks appear along the bottom of this trailer but not the top, as they are in other shots. But also—and get ready for some son-of-a-truck-driver nit-picking—there’s what looks like a gas tank on this trailer, with a little step in front of it like the kind you’d use to climb into the cab of the truck. And there’s only a single set of wheels on the back of the trailer. Usually there would be a second set behind these, but instead there’s a cavity.
Why’s it there? Because the AI model they used doesn’t know what the fuck it’s creating, and neither did the team of prompt engineers, who probably just described what they wanted here as “realistic red 18-wheeler with christmas lights on the trailer and the Coca-Cola logo painted on the side driving on a snowy mountain road, pine trees lighting up with christmas lights as it goes by,” and when they saw this, they thought “yep, looks like a big ol’ truck” and moved on.
I’ve never worked as an artist, but I feel sure that if someone hired an artist to create a CGI truck and that person did it entirely from memory, they’d lose their job. Here, it’s close enough for marketing people who’ve never cared or even considered whether anyone else would.
Oh yeah, then the trailer just keeps going, like the ship at the beginning of Spaceballs:
I assure you, trailers don’t just have a random set of wheels in the middle like this. | Screenshot: YouTube
The trucks morph as they’re sprinkled into other shots throughout the commercial, getting lights along the top and a gigantic Coca-Cola logo that spans the whole trailer:
Then the trucks lose some of the lights, swapping them out for the smaller, pointier cheap string lights that you’d wrap your tree in. And for some reason, the truck now has eight sets of wheels, while the trailer has none. Also, the license plate is indecipherable, the truck’s brand badge makes no sense, and the smaller Coca-Cola logo on the hood of the truck is now just a liiiiittle screwy:
In this next shot, I like how the truck’s bumper is kind of fucked and dirty. Just like how they’d be in real life! Also, the lights morphed again; now they’re big bulbs again but look like they were put on in a hurry by a lightly drunk dad on a too-cold night. The trailer finally has the right number of wheels, but uh, now the truck is totally missing its own rear wheels:
After that, we see a caravan of trucks crossing a bridge, and again, they’re wrong! They’re all day cab trucks — that’s the kind that looks all stubby, because it’s not meant for long haul drives and doesn’t have a bed. You wouldn’t usually see one of these out in the country at night, and definitely not a conga line of them. But on the rare occasion you would, they would definitely have all of their rear wheels.
Like the long haul sleeper cab trucks, these should have one set of wheels in the front, then two sets of four in the back to support the forward weight of the trailer. But instead, they just have one of those sets. Because who the fuck cares, right? Get in line, nerd! Last one to get festive and buy Coke products is a satan-worshipping atheist!
Here, let’s take a break from trucks to consider this weird-ass billboard in the middle of the woods, with ol’ Sundblom’s Claus winking at a bunch of rabbits who should really be hibernating but instead have apparently been boning all winter:
Or how about these puppies? If you’ve gone deep enough into the poisoned well of AI videos, you can practically feel how badly the AI model wanted to give them extra legs. I think I even see one in there, under the left-hand puppies foreleg at the end of this shot, but I’m not sure. Okay, maybe it did the dogs fine — great job, Real Magic AI! — but why are there two lamps on that furniture in the background? What’s with the snow on the windowsill inside the house?
Also, what is that reflection? The Coca-Cola Pizza Hut is here!
Look, I’m certain there are people out there who see these goofs and think “So what? Those Christmas ads are all shitty, anyway.” And guess what: I super agree with you, I don’t give a fuck if I never see another Coca-Cola ad in my life!
But that’s also missing the point. Yes, these ads have always been cynical programming meant to activate the reward-seeking section of your brain, to entice you to, next time you pass a convenience store or go get groceries, make sure you pick up a drink that has no nutritional value and was one part of the reason I was morbidly obese as a teenager. (This is a lie. It was not Coca-Cola, it was the far-superior Dr. Pepper that gave me my many layers.) But they’ve also traditionally been expensive, which means they created lots of jobs. That means they were the work of scores of artisans. Human beings who cared about the job they did. Teams of people who gave a shit about the work in front of them, because if they didn’t, they’d probably lose their jobs. Any one of these mistakes would have gotten people at least a good ass-chewing, to use the parlance of my youth.
You could do good work with AI, sure. But you need more than the tech—it just doesn’t know it’s producing bullshit unless the people guiding it are paying enough attention. Making a commercial that’s as technically flawless as that 1995 one would require careful attention to detail; a kind of pride in churning out good work that the people behind this steaming trash didn’t have.
But that doesn’t come cheap, and cheap is what they want. It’s just oozing out of this whole thing. Like, consider the ending of this commercial, when the “camera” zooms in on a squirrel sitting at the top of a Christmas Tree. First, like the rabbits, that squirrel should be fucking sleeping. But also, why are we looking at this goddamn squirrel like it’s some kind of main character of this ad? The main character was all the fucked up trucks! Who makes that decision? Somebody who has seen this kind of shot but didn’t get why they were seeing it, that’s who. It’s the kind of shot that’s supposed to call back to something, but in this case there’s nothing to call back to, because none of this makes any damn sense. That’s not really AI’s problem; none of this is. This is all just what happens when executives think AI can let them skip over the creatives. This is what’s coming for movies and TV soon. Video games, too.
Okay, back to the trucks. Actually, you know what? I’m going to let you apply what you’ve learned today and identify what’s wrong with this image. Please fill out the quiz at the end of this blog.
