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Coca-Cola Reimagines Holidays Are Coming With Generative AI
Coca-Cola's 2024 Holidays Are Coming campaign is a three-film generative AI production created in the United States in November 2024, made in partnership with studios Secret Level, Silverside AI, and Wild Card, reviving the brand's iconic 1995 festive commercial platform with AI-generated visuals including snowy landscapes, polar bears, and the red Coca-Cola trucks.
Coca-Cola selected Holidays Are Coming for an AI-based creative update early in 2024, according to reporting by Forbes. The original 1995 commercial had become one of the most recognisable pieces of seasonal advertising in the United States, and the brand chose it as the foundation for a demonstration of what generative AI could deliver within the food and drink category. Three separate studios each produced a distinct version of the campaign, with Wild Card, Secret Level, and Silverside AI working independently to interpret the same visual and emotional brief. The resulting films retained the heart of the original — red trucks moving through wintry communities, festive animals, the silhouette of Santa Claus — while introducing AI-generated imagery that would have required extensive location filming under conventional production conditions.
Silverside AI alone created 110 versions of the advertisement, including 27 market localizations, as documented by Silverside AI's own published account of the production. The campaign ran across content, digital, and film channels, covering both Coca-Cola and Coca-Cola Zero in the United States market. By producing three distinct films through three separate AI studios simultaneously, Coca-Cola turned a single heritage creative platform into a proof-of-concept for the speed, scale, and adaptability that generative AI makes possible in advertising production.
Coca-Cola identified speed as the defining strategic advantage of generative AI production. Pratik Thakar, Vice President and Global Head of Generative AI at Coca-Cola, stated plainly in Ad Age, as quoted by New University on December 2, 2024: "More than cost, it's the speed … And then you can do more." That orientation toward capability rather than cost-cutting framed the campaign as an expansion of creative ambition rather than a budget exercise.
Production of the three AI-generated films took approximately two months, compared with roughly twelve months for conventional production of similar scope, according to reporting by techinformed.com. In the United States, where the holiday advertising window is intensely competitive and brand recall during the Thanksgiving-to-Christmas period is a measurable commercial asset, the ability to compress a year-long production cycle into eight weeks represents a structural competitive advantage. Coca-Cola's principal competitor in the carbonated soft drinks category, PepsiCo, has not publicly deployed generative AI at equivalent production scale for a seasonal campaign, making the 2024 Holidays Are Coming release a differentiating moment in the category. The broader carbonated soft drinks market in the United States sits within a global category that growthmarketreports.com estimates at approximately US$270 billion in 2024, with annual growth in the range of two to five percent. Within that market, the cola segment accounted for approximately 49.9 percent of the broader carbonated-beverages market in 2024, according to Market Us. Coca-Cola's decision to apply AI production to its most culturally embedded seasonal property — rather than a new or experimental creative territory — signals a strategic confidence that the technology can carry heritage brand equity without diluting it.
Three studios shaped three distinct creative interpretations of the same brief. Secret Level, Silverside AI, and Wild Card each brought different generative AI toolsets to bear on the visual language of Holidays Are Coming, producing films that share tonal continuity while demonstrating the range of what the technology can currently render.
Jason Zada, Founder of Secret Level, offered a precise account of the iterative nature of AI production in a statement published by Forbes on November 16, 2024: "We must have run that squirrel [through AI] in the beginning of that video a couple hundred times." That single observation captures the fundamental shift in production craft that generative AI introduces — iteration replaces location scheduling, and volume of generation replaces the logistics of live capture. The AI tools used across the production included Leonardo, Luma, Runway, and Kling, as documented by musebyclios.com and silverside.ai. These platforms enabled the generation of snowy landscapes, polar bears emerging from wintry forests, and digital actors created with permission from real likenesses — elements that would have required controlled location shoots, animal wranglers, and extended post-production pipelines under conventional methods. Silverside AI's contribution was particularly notable in terms of scale: 110 versions of the advertisement, including 27 market localizations, were produced from a single creative framework, as documented by Silverside AI. By eliminating costly live filming in snowy locations, the production also removed the geographic and logistical constraints that have historically limited the adaptability of large-scale seasonal campaigns in the United States market.
System1 gave the 2024 Holidays Are Coming AI-generated campaign a 5.9 out of 6 Star Rating for brand-building potential, as reported by Andrew Tindall in The Drum on November 15, 2024. That score places the campaign in a category of advertising with strong long-term commercial effectiveness by System1's established measurement methodology. A separate data point reinforces the brand signal: 98 percent of viewers identified Coca-Cola within 15 seconds of viewing the campaign, also per System1 research as reported by The Drum. These two figures together indicate that the AI-generated films successfully preserved the brand recognition infrastructure of the original 1995 platform, transferring visual equity across a fundamentally different production method.
Creative reception in the United States was, however, genuinely divided. Muse by Clio, reporting on November 18, 2024, described viewer reactions as "very mixed," with a significant portion of audiences characterising the films as "dystopian" and "hollow." MediaPost on November 23, 2024 reported that System1 research found emotional response varied sharply between audiences familiar with AI-generated content and those encountering it without that frame of reference. The tension between strong brand-building scores and polarised qualitative reception is itself the most analytically significant result of this campaign: it demonstrates that generative AI can replicate the recognisability of a heritage creative platform while simultaneously introducing an uncanny register that some audiences find alienating. For Coca-Cola and Coca-Cola Zero in the United States, the 2024 Holidays Are Coming campaign functions less as a resolved creative statement and more as a high-visibility stress test of AI production at brand scale.
Coca-Cola's Holidays Are Coming AI-generated campaign is a three-film series released in the United States in November 2024. Produced by Secret Level, Silverside AI, and Wild Card, it revives the brand's 1995 seasonal platform using generative AI tools including Leonardo, Luma, Runway, and Kling to recreate iconic visual elements for Coca-Cola and Coca-Cola Zero.
Three AI studios produced the 2024 Holidays Are Coming campaign. Secret Level, founded by Jason Zada, Silverside AI, and Wild Card each created a separate film. AI tools including Leonardo, Luma, Runway, and Kling were used across the production, as documented by musebyclios.com and silverside.ai.
Production of the AI-generated Holidays Are Coming campaign took approximately two months, according to techinformed.com. Conventional production of equivalent scope typically requires around twelve months. Silverside AI alone produced 110 versions of the advertisement, including 27 market localizations, demonstrating the scale advantage of generative AI workflows.
Audience response in the United States was divided. System1 awarded the campaign 5.9 out of 6 stars for brand-building potential, as reported by The Drum on November 15, 2024. However, Muse by Clio on November 18, 2024 reported that many viewers described the films as dystopian and hollow, reflecting broader public ambivalence toward AI-generated advertising.
System1 rated the 2024 Holidays Are Coming AI campaign 5.9 out of 6 stars for brand-building potential, per Andrew Tindall's assessment in The Drum on November 15, 2024. Separately, System1 research found that 98 percent of viewers identified Coca-Cola within 15 seconds, confirming strong brand signal preservation across the AI-generated format.
The 2024 campaign directly revives the visual language of the original 1995 Holidays Are Coming commercial, retaining red trucks, snowy community scenes, festive animals, and seasonal music, according to reporting by Businessplus Ie and musebyclios.com. Generative AI replaced live location filming while preserving the emotional and aesthetic continuity of the three-decade-old platform.
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