A set of AI-generated adverts from The Coca-Cola Company could point the way to a grim future of soulless, synthesised film remakes. Yay!
Because nothing captures the spirit of Christmas like creepy, home knit-clad spectres from our deepest nightmares, The Coca-Cola Company has embraced the power of generative AI for its 2024 festive marketing campaign.
Or, more accurately, the firm has commissioned San Francisco-based studio Silverside to create a new version of the Coca-Cola Holiday Caravan commercial which first debuted in 1995.
Like any worthwhile nightmare, everything looks familiar at first: the wintry landscapes, the Coca-Cola trucks trundling through the snow, the catchy choral chant of ‘Holidays are coming’. Gradually, though, a sense of unease settles in like a morning frost. The smiles on those seemingly normal human faces don’t quite meet the eyes; the scale of a glass Cola bottle appears to change size between shots. And why does it feel as though everything’s moving a little too slowly for comfort? Is this festive wonderland under water?
A page dedicated to the Coca-Cola campaign on Silverside’s website explains that a project of this scale would ordinarily take about a year, but thanks to the advent of generative AI, the studio – with the help of two other firms, Secret Level and Wildcard – was able to create the campaign in just two months. In fact, the studio managed to create a whole fleet of commercials, all of them riffing on the image of crimson trucks delivering crates of fizzy pop. One of them seems weirdly fixated on languid shots of animals reacting to the lorries passing by.
“This project pushed the limits of AI while highlighting the irreplaceable human touch,” Silverside writes on its website. “Using a blend of proprietary technology and market AI tools, Silverside AI empowered our team to generate top-level ideas and collaborate with Coca-Cola seamlessly…”
The studio estimates that a total of 40 people worked on the commercials, and that their creation took in ‘10,000 frames’ and ‘5,000 video segments.’ All of which might add to the defensive argument that AI will augment existing creative jobs rather than replace them. But look again at the original commercial from 1995, and you begin to appreciate how expensive it must have been to produce: making it would have required numerous actors, cinematographers, lighting technicians, a small army of drivers, and so forth. The 2024 adverts reduced that array of jobs down to a team of VFX artists and computer operators sitting at their workstations.
The difference between the 1995 ad and its new iteration is stark. Where the 90s ad felt as though it existed in some fantastical version of the real world, the modern commercials exist in a weird limbo between photo-realism and uncanny valley eeriness. It’s the Invasion Of The Body Snatchers of TV spots.
In The American Nightmare, a 2000 documentary about the history of horror movies, University of Chicago professor Tom Gunning observed that cinema has a certain sinister quality baked into its very fabric. “Cinema itself can become a haunted house,” Gunning said. “When cinema was first invented, people said, ‘This is immortality. Death will no longer be total.’ But what first seemed to promise immortality ultimately delivers ghosts.”
What generative AI delivers is something even more haunting: not the images of real people, captured and doomed to repeat the same actions over and again, but rather the distorted faces of what a computer thinks people look like. The smiling citizens of Coca-Cola’s adverts don’t exist, and never will exist; their likenesses are a collage of photos and videos scraped from the internet and smeared into new forms.
The decision to revivify an ad from the 1990s also speaks to the direction of travel we’re heading in culturally. This may be just an advert we’re talking about here, but as the likes of Disney and DreamWorks continue to dust off and rework their back catalogue (Moana in the case of the former; How To Train Your Dragon with the latter), there’s the overriding feeling that some of media’s most powerful companies have collectively decided that the best stories have already been told. Pop culture’s highest watermarks are established. Now all that needs to be done is to revise and rework what has already been made, with generative AI being the solution to turning out those iterations more quickly and at a lower cost.
Jeffrey Katzenberg, one-time founder of DreamWorks Animation and producer of The Prince Of Egypt and Shrek, said as much last year.
“In the good old days… it took 500 artists five years to make a world-class animated movie,” Katzenberg said at the Bloomberg New Economy Panel in Singapore. “I think it won’t take 10 percent of that. Literally, I don’t think it will take 10 percent of that three years from now.”
The Coca-Cola ads are therefore more than ads. Unless the public actively, angrily pushes back against them, they’re a glimpse of the future. In this regard, the once cheerful-looking Coke lorry becomes a metaphor: the AI juggernaut is unstoppable and heading right for us. For the thousands of people who make their livelihoods in creative fields, holidays are indeed coming. Merry Christmas!
The Coca-Cola AI Campaign is screening on a device near you now.
