Published December 2, 2024 · By CampaignsLive · Case Study
Coca-Cola’s 2024 holiday campaign was the most visible AI-related brand misstep of the year. The campaign updated the brand’s iconic “Holidays Are Coming” truck imagery — Santa’s polar bears, snowy roads, golden lights, sweater-clad townspeople — using AI-generated video as the primary production tool. The campaign ran across television, social, and out-of-home placements in major markets. The audience response was sharp, sustained, and overwhelmingly negative.
The backlash was not surprising in its existence. It was surprising in its intensity, given that Coca-Cola had been more careful than most major brands about how it used AI in its 2023 “Create Real Magic” campaign, and given that the brand’s marketing leadership had presumably reviewed the work multiple times before release. Something specific about the 2024 holiday version of the AI bet had gone wrong, and the diagnostic value of working out what is worth doing now that the dust has settled.
What the campaign actually was
The 2024 holiday campaign reimagined Coca-Cola’s “Holidays Are Coming” ad — a piece of brand creative that had run, in various forms, since 1995 and had become embedded in the cultural texture of December in many markets. The 2024 version retained the visual vocabulary of the original: red trucks, snowy roads, lights, polar bears, the deer of the brand’s holiday illustrations, the spirit of communal warmth.
The execution was AI-generated. The production team — by reported accounts — used a combination of generative video tools to produce the truck driving sequences, the environmental imagery, and the character animation. The result was technically competent at the per-shot level. The motion held. The lighting was credible. The atmospheric quality was consistent with the brand’s holiday register.
The result was also, in aggregate, off. Audiences across multiple markets reacted with a specific kind of dismay that was harder to articulate than the typical “this looks like AI” critique. The work did not have the obvious tells. It had something more diffuse — a quality that one frequently-quoted social-media commentator described as “the soul was missing.”
What “the soul was missing” actually meant
The phrase is too vague to be useful as a diagnostic, but the underlying observation is worth unpacking. Three specific things produced the audience response.
The reference set was nostalgia, and AI reproduces nostalgia badly. “Holidays Are Coming” is a piece of brand creative whose power derives from cultural memory. Audiences remember the original 1995 ad. The 2024 version was trying to invoke that memory and update it for current production aesthetics. AI generation, at the 2024 state of the art, is structurally bad at this kind of invocation. The output is constructed from training-data-derived patterns of “Christmas,” “trucks,” “snow,” “polar bears.” The output is not constructed from the specific cultural imprint of the 1995 ad. The result reads as Christmas-shaped content rather than as the descendant of the campaign the audience remembered.
The seams were not visible per-shot but were visible across the sequence. Each individual shot in the 2024 spot looked credible. The truck looked like a truck; the snow looked like snow; the polar bear looked like a polar bear. But the assembly of these elements produced a sequence in which the relationships between shots felt arbitrary. The viewer’s sense of being in a coherent world — a piece of brand creative’s job — broke down. The seams were not in the images; they were between the images.
The character motion was almost-still. The 2024 state of the art in generative video produces motion that is recognizable in retrospect: a soft, slightly-too-slow, slightly-too-uniform quality that distinguishes generated motion from filmed motion. Coca-Cola’s 2024 spot, like most generative video work from that year, had this quality. For most uses it was acceptable. For an updated version of an iconic legacy campaign, where the audience was implicitly comparing the new motion to the remembered motion of the original, it failed.
The strategic mistake underneath
The diagnostic above describes the proximate failure. The strategic mistake was further upstream.
The mistake was choosing this campaign, of all campaigns, to update generatively. “Holidays Are Coming” is a piece of brand equity that does not need to be modernized. The 1995 ad is still effective, still recognizable, still doing its commercial job. The brand does not need to refresh it; it needs to preserve it. Choosing to refresh it with the most contested production technology of the moment, in a year when the audience response to AI brand creative was already known to be ambivalent, was a category error.
The case is the inverse of the 2023 “Create Real Magic” campaign. Where “Create Real Magic” was a low-risk, well-bounded experiment — community engagement, curated outputs, foregrounded AI framing — the 2024 holiday campaign was a high-risk, central-equity production, with the AI in the spine of the work rather than at the surface, and with the audience comparing the output to one of the brand’s most-loved historical assets.
The same brand that had handled the technology well in 2023 misread the risk envelope a year later. The trade press read the case as a Coca-Cola misstep; the more accurate read is that it was a category misjudgment that any brand could have made on the same assets.
What this taught the broader industry
Three things.
Nostalgia and AI are a bad combination. Brand work that depends on cultural memory is harder for AI to reproduce than brand work that does not. The legacy campaign refresh is the highest-risk category of AI brand creative production. Brands that have run AI refreshes of iconic legacy work in 2025 have, on the whole, fared poorly. The pattern is consistent enough to be a working rule.
Per-shot quality is not the same as sequence coherence. Generative video evaluated frame-by-frame can pass the bar. Evaluated as a thirty-second narrative, the bar is higher and the failure modes are different. Brands that have approved generative work on per-shot review have repeatedly been surprised by audience reactions to the assembled sequence.
The audience is more sensitive than the brand teams expect. Generative AI is a visible cultural conversation. Audiences come to AI-generated work with a baseline level of attention and skepticism that they do not bring to traditional production. A piece of work that would have been received neutrally as traditional creative is received critically as AI creative. Brand teams that have not internalized this end up surprised by the response.
The 2024 holiday campaign was Coca-Cola’s tuition payment for these three lessons. The brand’s 2025 holiday creative, by reported indications, went a different direction — back to live-action production with selective AI augmentation, with the AI work undisclosed in framing but explicitly limited to areas where it could not produce the kind of failure mode the 2024 spot produced.
For the related discussion of how to use AI in brand creative without producing this kind of failure, see AI Creative vs. AI Slop. For Coca-Cola’s earlier and more successful AI campaign, see What Coca-Cola’s “Create Real Magic” Got Right.