Coca-Cola has unveiled another AI generated holiday spot, continuing a creative use that fuses the brand’s own iconic seasonal images with the machine learning of generative tools. The ad, created with the AI studio Secret Level, leans on fixtures you know — polar bears, Santa and the red delivery truck — but it relies on machine-assisted animation so that it can go faster and spend less than a traditional shoot.
Inside the New Spot and How It Was Produced With AI
The commercial brings the “Holidays Are Coming” world back to life featuring a cast of animals and the brand’s famous Christmas characters. Instead of entirely hand-animated frames or expensive live-action productions, the group created a generative pipeline that allowed them to make a 90-second film with iterative human supervision — artists art-directing scenes, animators cleaning outputs, and editors sewing sequences together into a coherent narrative.
Escape From Manos founder Jason Zada said the project took about a month to complete with an average crew size of 20. That time-to-market is remarkable for a national holiday campaign, which can span months with multiple international shoots, VFX houses and extensive post work.
Speed and Cost Are the Pitch for AI-Driven Production
Think about the benchmark: Coca-Cola’s original 1990s “Holidays Are Coming” commercial featured three real 40-foot trucks covered in about 30,000 lights, according to The Independent — a classic but a hefty logistical production. Meanwhile, AI-augmented pipelines can slash physical builds, travel and re-shots.
According to the New York Times, studios exploring generative processes in animation claim potential 90% cost savings in certain elements. And while real budgets may differ, the trend is clear: AI lets brands iterate fast, localize versions and make late-stage changes without resetting an entire shoot.
And for a brand with defined assets — the Coke red, the Santa iconography and so on, which can be seen as something like an object or person in a dream (here represented by their filtered or processed cues) — AI also serves as a means to quickly recombine those distinctive cues. It’s an operational advantage in a crowded holiday ad market where frequency is high and attention is scarce.
A Flashpoint for Artistic Labor and Industry Debate
The release won’t silence the argument over AI in commercial film. Artists and filmmakers contend that generative systems can draw on training data scraped from human-made work without permission, endanger livelihoods in animation and postproduction, and contribute to the sector’s energy use. Writer and actor unions pushed to insert artificial-intelligence guardrails into recent contracts, reflecting the fear in creative fields.
And environmental questions hover over the technology as well. The International Energy Agency has sounded the alarm: Soaring demand in data-hogging centers — including those enabled by AI workloads — might cause electricity use to spike in a few years. For marketers with sustainability pledges, the carbon math of generative video is increasingly part of the brief.
Do Viewers Care if It’s AI or How the Ad Was Made?
According to Secret Level, consumer testing surrounding last year’s Coca-Cola AI spot tested well (in terms of strong ad effectiveness) when the execution was presented without flagging how it came together. That information is consistent with an age-old truism in advertising: viewers respond to story and craft far more than they do the tool set behind them.
And yet, the popular mood on AI is a nuanced one. 53% of Americans said they were more worried than enthusiastic about the proliferation of AI, according to Pew Research Center. Regulators have noticed: The Federal Trade Commission has warned brands against misleading advertising about AI and suggested that deceptive or undisclosed synthetic media could draw scrutiny.
Transparency standards are evolving. The Association of National Advertisers and other industry groups are calling for clear policies around data provenance, consent and disclosure when synthetic or manipulated elements may materially impact viewers’ perceptions of a message. Expect brands to begin testing on-screen or behind-the-scenes disclosures in an effort to strike the nimble balance of trust and creative freedom.
What It Means for Holiday Advertising and Brand Strategy
Coca-Cola’s decision is one reflection of a much larger trend: Generative tools are migrating from one-off stunts to repeatable components of the ad-making stack. The company has played in this space before, from “Real Magic” experiments that have invited fans to co-create art with AI, to production pilots that compress timelines considerably for global campaigns.
Other brands have only dipped their toe at scale — Heinz’s “A.I. Ketchup” creative is one significant example — and many more clandestinely incorporate AI into previsualization, storyboard expansion, background plates and versioning. The distinction now is that holiday ads are cultural events, and artificial shots can be far easier to detect and argue over.
Whether you embrace or repudiate the aesthetic is beside the point: The business case is convincing. AI is hard to ignore when there are faster turnarounds and lower marginal costs for running new variants, as well as refreshing evergreen brand codes. Coca-Cola’s new holiday spot is evidence that the industry has moved beyond its pilot phase — and headed toward a season in which “how it was made” is as heated as “how it makes you feel.”