How Coca-Cola Reinvented a Holiday Classic with AI

One of the most talked-about campaigns of the holidays so far is Coca-Cola’s artificial intelligence (AI) reboot of the classic “Holidays Are Coming” ad.

Since the rise of generative AI, the technology has sparked fear among some in the industry who worry it could hurt creative jobs. But the makers of Coca-Cola ads at Silverside AI, an innovation lab of agency Pereira O’Dell, say AI has enhanced the human creativity behind one of the world’s most famous campaigns.

Coca-Cola’s global holiday campaign this year includes the “Holidays Are Coming” remake, the Christmas Truck Tour, the second annual “The World Needs More Santas” ad and a festive AI digital experience that lets people create personalized snow globe animations.

This isn’t Coca-Cola’s first AI-driven holiday push. Last year’s ‘Create Real Magic’ campaign included a feature that allowed people to create digital Christmas cards using generative AI.

This year, however, AI played an even bigger role in reimagining Coca-Cola’s holiday campaign for a modern era. The AI ​​version of “Holidays Are Coming” nods to the original while making the campaign more personal and relevant to audiences around the world, Silverside AI leaders explained.

PJ Pereira, co-founder and partner at Silverside AI and co-founder and creative chairman at Pereira O’Dell, and Rob Wrubel, co-founder and managing partner at Silverside AI, lifted the lid on the creative process and what they learned in the process the road.

A modern twist on a holiday icon

Since its debut in 1995, Coca-Cola’s Christmas Truck has become synonymous with the holidays. Earlier this year, the brand tapped Silverside AI to create “a modern interpretation” of the truck, Pereira told ADWEEK.

Silverside AI turned to generative AI platforms including Stable Diffusion, Pactto, DALL-E, ChatGPT and its proprietary tool Director Magic to create the ad, in a process that felt more like “software development” than traditional filmmaking, Pereira said .

The use of AI accelerated the creation process and allowed creatives to see ideas come to life instantly. Silverside AI “produced a rough sketch of the site within three days of one of our first meetings (with the client),” Wrubel recalls.

“The moment you have a process where creatives can immediately see ideas come to life in real time, it completely transforms the creative process. It is something revolutionary,” Pereira said.

AI also made the process more collaborative, with Silverside AI able to send edits and updates to the customer almost every day instead of every few weeks, Wrubel said.