Coca-Cola’s 2025 AI Christmas Advert Is a Visual Disaster

If heights do not bother you, go ahead: watch this visual monstrosity and wipe away the tears.

Coca-Cola is responsible for much of what people associate with Christmas: Father Christmas in vivid red, and endearing-looking polar bears. Since the 1930s, the company has been known for its advertising ritual in the run-up to the festive season, presenting its fizzy drink as an emblem of celebration, sharing and family.

This year, however, the sermon has once again acquired a new preacher, with the American giant choosing AI to create its 2025 advert. Google recently tried something similar and achieved a fairly polished visual result, but the world’s leading soft-drink seller has made a real mess of it, delivering a deeply odd spectacle, if not an outright frightening one.

Coca-Cola, the official gravedigger of Christmas spirit

The company had already dipped a toe into this field in 2023 with a limited-edition AI-created bottle. In 2024, it went further by releasing three adverts that were also artificially generated. As you can see below, the outcome was simply disastrous: terrifying faces, visual artefacts everywhere and a horrendously synthetic finish. “Creepy” is the word that best comes to mind.

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Apparently, Coca-Cola did not question its approach and decided to do it again this year, “doubling down”. According to the Wall Street Journal, the new campaign was made with Silverside and Secret Level, the studios already behind the previous fiasco. This time, the company evidently decided to avoid human faces and focus on… animals.

Coca-Cola’s AI animals fall into the uncanny valley

The result is certainly far better than the earlier videos, but let us not beat about the bush: it is ugly, and it reeks of the uncanny valley more than ever. The lighting effects are generally convincing, yet everything else is a complete failure. The animals in the advert - bears, penguins, seals, sloths, rabbits and dogs, among others - have vacant, idiotic stares; the textures are appalling, the animation is just as bad, and the transitions from one sequence to another are clumsy.

Running for a laborious minute, the advert swings between uncomfortable hyperrealism and a cartoon on acid, all set to music that feels thoroughly out of place. You can form your own view by watching it below, but when one considers what Sora 2 (OpenAI) and Veo 3.1 (Google) can produce, it is fair to wonder whether Coca-Cola’s marketing teams even watched the video before releasing it.

A cut-price Christmas, and it shows

The worst part is that Coca-Cola’s chief marketing officer, Manolo Arroyo, actually boasts about it: “Previously, we had to start filming a year in advance. Now, everything can be completed in a month.” It almost sounds like an abattoir manager congratulating himself on doubling production speed. Under this efficiency-driven newspeak, patience - the very thing creativity requires - becomes a failing, and making something quickly is treated as making it better.

70,000 video sequences for one Coca-Cola advert

The Wall Street Journal also reports that no fewer than 100 people worked on the advert, including five “AI specialists” tasked with generating and refining more than 70,000 video sequences. Yes, you read that correctly: 70,000. One can only imagine what the rejected attempts looked like. One hundred people is more than enough to make a film, yet it was plainly insufficient to create anything remotely decent.

Holidays are Coming is the name of this dreadful advert, although this time we sincerely hope the holidays do not arrive too soon. Coca-Cola can be criticised for countless things - plastic pollution, highly questionable industrial practices, disastrous water management in countries of the Global South, and so on - but it once at least had a reputation for producing memorable adverts. Often beautiful and inventive, these campaigns used to come from the minds of talented artists such as Haddon Sundblom, Bill Backer, Harvey Gabor and Ridley Scott. We will not resort to the familiar “things were better in the past” line, but there is undeniably an abyssal gulf between the hand of an illustrator and that of a prompt engineer. The hundreds of mocking YouTube comments received by the video, despite Coca-Cola having only just released it, make that clear enough. We still do not know what is in Coke, but one thing is certain: the Christmas spirit is no longer among its ingredients!