One of the world known beverage giants, Coca-Cola, has recently released its new holiday advertisement, which was done with the help of generative artificial intelligence (AI), proving that the company is involved in the sphere of innovations, yet this advertisement brought up its own criticism regarding the level of emotion it makes.
Though the campaign was expected to be less time consuming and less expensive, the ad did not give the warm emotions and nostalgia that were traditionally linked to Coca-Cola and its festive branding.
Innovation and Nostalgia – and the Hybrid Effect
The new campaign by Coca-Cola is based on the famous theme of the holidays are coming that was represented years ago in the Coca-Cola campaign, this time the convoy is comprised of cherry red trucks and is traveling through a snow covered town.
The version of the year was created with almost no live actors and real life sets but via AI tools, having several studios and thousands of generated frames.
Coca-Cola has justified the strategy as such to make its holiday place on a yearly basis more dynamic and up to date in production trends.
But the reaction of the viewers and film critics has been swift and mixed. On the one hand, the brand succeeded in accomplishing its objective of creating a big scale commercial within a fraction of the normal time and cost.
On the other hand, a downside of the AI-generated images is that they feel thin, detached, and, even, to some extent, uninformed as compared to ads created by humans in the pre-AI days.
Certainly, among the specific problems mentioned are the clumsy animation, varying styles of the characters, and the lack of familiar live action elements like Santa Claus, who has always been a part of the Coca-Cola holiday narrative.
Although the reaction was negative, certain consumer testing companies indicate that the advertisement is still doing well in terms of brand awareness and recall and indicate that an average viewer might not react in the same way as experts in the creative industry.
However, numerous creatives claim that the campaign can pose some basic questions, Does the emotional appeal get lost when the machine kills the creative resource? But what does that imply about the future of brand storytelling?
Production wise, the application of AI enabled Coca-Cola to increase production and produce regional or custom variations within a shorter period.
The generative AI sizable of the company focusing on the idea under discussion highlighted that the technology shortens the time spent on basically every process, such as storyboarding, asset creation, and color grading, processes that would have taken months in the past and can be accomplished within weeks currently.
Nevertheless, the trade-off still seems to be in the non-material sense of the end product the magic of human creation and relationship.
The implication of this on brands and marketers
The experiment of Coca-Cola provides a major case study in the way brands are overcoming the conflict between efficiency and emotion.
Generative AI on the one hand promises to create content very quickly, to customization, and to savings across the globe.
On the other, the human touch, the subtlety of animation, the melancholy, the emotions induced by cues, and the instance of emotional connections are factors.
Marketers that observe this campaign can learn a number of lessons:
- Productiveness is not identical to influence: An accelerated production process will be handy, not at the expense of brand emotion or sense.
- Emotion drives memory: The successful campaigns of Coca-Cola are associated with emotional symbols such as trucks, polar bears, and holiday lights, which have a long history of presence in the minds of the target audience, and in cases where the symbols change too rapidly, the nostalgic feeling of the audience may be impaired.
- Openness and expectation of viewers are important: Other audiences were negatively responding to the fact that they felt it was an AI-created advertisement. Perception affected the reception, whether it was the reason or not.
- Hybrid models may dominate: At present, such brands that use AI to act efficiently and human imagination to be emotionally devoted can become the most successful combination.
Simply put, the new AI-based holiday advertisement by Coca-Cola is a smart move into an advertisement of the future.
It shows how generative AI can be used to make production at scale streamlined however, it points at what cost it may come, emotionally, and the loss of brand authenticity when human craft is replaced.
Whenever brands enter this area, the message is denied, technology is a device, not a replacement for resonant storytelling.
