Coca-Cola's Next AI Commercial - Without People, With Making-Of
[11:27 Sun,9.November 2025 by blip]
Last year, Coca-Cola took a lot of flak for its AI-generated Christmas spot featuring zombie-like fake humans and red trucks that looked different in every shot. Now, the commercial for 2025 has been released... and once again, unimaginative, light-adorned AI trucks drive through snowy AI landscapes. This time, however, they are only admired by AI critters; they are more realistic to generate (do they also buy sweet soft drinks?). The truck wheels, unlike last year, turn almost realistically, hallelujah.
Unsurprisingly, this spot is also not well received. So poorly received, in fact, that Coca-Cola has now even released a commercial about its commercial. The "making-of," in turn, sounds like it was generated by Google&s Notebook LLM—two voices talk up the production with remarks from the PR phrasebook:
"It really feels like this work is, you know, actively shaping how storytelling is evolving. It shows Coca-Cola really re-imagining the creative workflow especially in this AI era."
For the commercial, 5 people generated 70,000 video segments over 30 days, using various AI generators, apparently under the umbrella of the overall LTX solution (which is shown with some prompts). That&s a lot of snippets, most of which were presumably unusable, as is usually the case with AI-generated assets. Nevertheless, the production was naturally much faster and also cheaper than classic CGI creation—that&s ultimately what is meant when it says creative workflows are being "re-imagined."
"Combining human creativity with AI to turbocharge expression and imagination, giving creatives more freedom, speed, and control than ever before."
To make the whole thing look creative, it is emphasized that they particularly refined the look—a few alternatively prompted styles are shown.
"The look they settled on is really interesting. They tried a few things out. But they landed on this super expressive hyper realism. Really cinematic scenes."
Regarding the workflow, it is particularly highlighted that although a few details had to be manually adjusted afterward, the system is now much more sophisticated than the previous year.
"The big shift is clear. What we used to fix at the end, we&re now building right from the start. Post-production is the new pre-production."
Interestingly, there is still room for improvement regarding the consistency of the trucks. Surely it will work even better next year when the same clip is released for the third time—perhaps again with... humans?
;)
;)