The Coca-Cola Company returns with another Christmas advert – this one employing fewer people than last year’s. That’s progress. Great news everyone! Coca-Cola is back with another AI-generated Christmas commercial. In what may prove to be a new tradition for the fizzy drink mega-corporation, it’s another promo filled with crimson trucks and a curious obsession ... Coca-Cola Christmas advert 2025 review | Churning out the Christmas cheer with AI
The Coca-Cola Company returns with another Christmas advert – this one employing fewer people than last year’s. That’s progress.
Great news everyone! Coca-Cola is back with another AI-generated Christmas commercial. In what may prove to be a new tradition for the fizzy drink mega-corporation, it’s another promo filled with crimson trucks and a curious obsession with improbably-proportioned animals. You may recall last year’s ads, which featured bears and penguins as well as creepy humans with identical teeth; this year’s has, among other critters, rabbits and squirrels with huge eyes that stare deep into your very soul.
For The Coca-Cola Company, it sounds as though Christmas is now officially the season of generative AI, with the company having again teamed up with a studio called Silverside to produce its festive commercial.
Coke boss Pratik Thakar has trotted out the usual line about the genie being out of the bottle in an accompanying interview with The Hollywood Reporter, which could be read as, “We’re using AI to make ads now. Get used to it.”
“The haters on the Internet are the loudest,” Thakar told the outlet. “A lot of the people complaining last year were from the creative industry who were just afraid – afraid for their jobs, afraid for what it did. But I think the spot tested really well and average people really enjoyed it.”
In a further show of seeming defiance, Coca-Cola has also put out a kind of mock making-of video on its official YouTube channel. It’s revealing, but perhaps not in the way the company intended.
As footage from the ad plays, a pair of narrators – purportedly designers who worked on the ad – explain the process that went into making it. This wasn’t a case of just typing in a few prompts and editing the resulting clips together, they say. No, they typed in a vast number of prompts and then edited the resulting clips together.
According to their figures, they generated 70,000 pieces of footage over the course of the project. It’s a staggering number, particularly given that we’re also told that just “five specialists” worked on it for 30 days. From a quick bit of back-of-a-napkin maths – five people working 30 eight-hour days – that still equates to 58.3 clips generated per hour. That’s an awful lot of prompting, and even the male-sounding voice ill-advisedly uses the phrase “churn out” in relation to the generation of all these clips.
(There’s already been some online speculation that the voices in this clip may also be AI-generated. We can’t quite make up our minds either way, but the fact that we’re even asking the question speaks to the topsy-turvy Philip K Dick world we’re now living in.)
The result, the curiously robotic-sounding designers tell us, is much better than last year’s.
“Extensive post-production fixes were required,” the chap says, failing the Voight-Kampff test in the process. “Wheels looked like they were sliding instead of rolling. Physics needed correction. Logos had to be adjusted and re-positioned. Now AI is enabling creators.”
But here again there’s something revealing: last year’s Christmas Coke ad had 40 people working on it – eight times the number of staff that worked on the 2025 ad. In the space of just 12 months and two commercials, we can already spot the direction of travel: corporations want to push employment numbers as close to (Coke) zero as they can possibly manage.
At this rate, 2026’s Cola advert will be worked on by one person. The following year’s will be entirely self-generated, triggered by a reminder plugged into Google Calendar and sent directly to Sora 2.
Ironically, this year marks the 30th anniversary of the first ‘Holidays Are Coming’ Cola ad, and as we wrote last year, it’s worth revisiting that commercial to see what’s changed. Sure, it’s a promo for a drink that rots your teeth, but it’s made with technical precision and artistry: there are trucks, physical sets, actors, craftspeople and crew members working behind the scenes. It’s quite a contrast to these new commercials, which have all the warmth and sincerity of an automated message from your internet service provider.
There’s also something deeply cynical about the accompanying making-of video, which both wants to impress on us that, hey, we don’t just churn this stuff out, but also openly marvels at how corners can be cut (“post-production is the new pre-production”) and how few people were required to make it.
An advert designed to fill us with cosiness and warmth – from the company that basically invented Santa, no less – therefore carries a separate message worthy of Ebenezer Scrooge.
Coke ads are now the bellwether for dwindling creative industries. Coca-Cola is showing corporations everywhere how easy it is to cut costs, impress shareholders, and still come out with a passable product at the end. As long as it has snow, red trucks and animals in it, customers will be happy. Just ignore the haters in the YouTube comments.
Redundancies are comin’, redundancies are comin’…
