Coca-Cola Christmas Advert made with AI
Three years ago we worked on the big annual Christmas Coca-Cola TV commercial, a short section of hand drawn frame-by-frame animation playing a vintage festive animation on the telly. This year there was no small indie studio working on the big annual Christmas Coca-Cola advert because it’s all been done in AI.
When you look hard, technically it’s a mess (the truck is distorted, the wheels slide, the extras are giant sized) but the average festive coke supping punter doesn’t look hard. What they do see is the quick cut Christmas truck / bottle shot / sausage fingered santa – and of course, they love it. In fact, it tested at a whopping 5.9 (the max score in the fabulously esoteric System 1).
Of course it’s all a bit of a gimmick, and Coca-Cola have everyone talking about it, so even more reach than normal. Presumably there were plenty of humanoids working on this too, tap tapping away from their AI studios called stuff like Trojan and Klimt. What’s so bad about them prompting their way through production? They deserve a living as much as us lot riding around on our penny farthings drawing stuff.
I’m fairly sanguine about it all, as I believe there will always be opportunities in our industry for talented artists and storytellers. I can imagine a two-tier system evolving with AI spitting out endless hours of reworked content that was once originated by wonderful human being. Brands will have to decide if they want to shop at the big tesco or the local farmer’s market.
So if next year’s Coca-Cola’s TVC creative is done on potato prints, they know where to come!