How Coca-Cola Reinvented a Holiday Classic With AI

One of the buzziest campaigns of the holiday season so far is Coca-Cola’s artificial intelligence (AI) reboot of its classic ad, “Holidays Are Coming.”

Since the rise of generative AI, the technology has invoked fear from some in the industry who worry it could harm creative jobs. But the Coke ad creators at Silverside AI, an innovation lab part of agency Pereira O’Dell, say AI 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, its Christmas Truck Tour, the second annual “The World Needs More Santas” ad, and a festive digital AI experience that lets people create personalized snow globe animations.

This isn’t Coca-Cola’s first AI-driven holiday push. Last year, its “Create Real Magic” campaign included a feature that let people make digital holiday cards with generative AI. 

However, this year, AI played an even bigger role to reimagine 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 personalized and relevant to audiences around the world, Silverside AI’s 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 along the way.

A modern twist on a holiday icon

Since its debut in 1995, Coca-Cola’s Christmas Truck has become synonymous with the holiday season. Earlier this year, the brand called on 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 own tool Director Magic to create the ad, in a process that felt more like “software development” than traditional filmmaking, said Pereira. 

Using AI sped up the creation process and allowed creatives to see ideas come to life instantly. Silverside AI “produced a rough draft of the spot within three days of one of our first meetings [with the client],” Wrubel recalled. 

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

AI also made the process more collaborative, with Silverside AI able to send edits and updates to the client nearly every day rather than every couple of weeks, Wrubel said.