Iconic 90s Coca-Cola Christmas advert remake leaves fans ‘feeling sick’

The Coca-Cola Christmas advert is synonymous with the festive season for some, who love it even more than autumn’s pumpkin spice lattes.

But this year’s offering has got people talking for a different reason, because it is AI-generated.

While the original 1990s ad featured real lorries delivering real bottles to real delighted families, this time it’s all just pixels and code.

There are some parts of the two ads which would have admittedly been difficult to find real actors for, such as polar bears watching television.

But surely it wouldn’t have been impossible to film a bottle of coke being opened, people sipping it blissfully, or even a fleet of red trucks arriving with some CGI snow added in.

There are no huge AI blunders like a hand with six fingers, but it has an overall artificial feel with the images very smooth and in some cases slightly blurred, while movements are slow even as the ad skims quickly from scene to scene.

Faces in the video do not really exist, as the whole thing was constructed by generative AI, and there are telltale signs such as a lack of movement of truck wheels in the opening clips.

The campaign was called ‘a soulless and creepy dystopian nightmare’ by Tech Radar, while viewers on X called it ‘lazy’ and ‘sad’ or had even made them ‘feel sick’.

It has got them plenty of headlines though, so maybe it can’t be called a PR disaster.

PJ Pereira, co-founder and partner at Silverside AI which made the campaign, told Ad Week that several AI programmes were used to create it: Stable Diffusion, Pactto, DALL-E, ChatGPT, and its own tool Director Magic.

They were able to come up with a first draft in just three days.

And when Coca-Cola asked if it could be personalised for dozens of different markets, they realised it could as this isn’t ‘the old world’ anymore, so included skylines customised to the locations it will air in.