'You can’t beat the real thing'? Why Coca-Cola's AI Ads Are a Warning the Industry Cannot Afford to Ignore

I started my career in marketing and advertising. In the years since I've led high-profile campaigns focused on ethical retail and sustainability, brand communications where the brief was never wholly to reach millions of people, but to also to meaningfully engage and drive behaviour change and consumer choice among a set stakeholder groups.

So when I watch one of the world's most iconic brands spend two consecutive Christmases setting fire to decades of emotional equity, I have thoughts about Coca-Cola's recent festive adventures in artificial intelligence.

Let me be clear from the start: this is not an anti-AI piece. Far from it. But it is a piece about what happens when a brand mistakes efficiency for strategy.

The Brand That Owned Christmas

Cast your mind back. Coca-Cola has always understood something fundamental about brand marketing: people do not buy products, they buy feelings. The 1971 "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" campaign, gloriously cheesy, undeniably warm, a hilltop full of improbably diverse young people harmonising in matching outfits, was not selling fizzy drinks. It was selling human connection so earnest it made you smile. I hadn't even been born, yet I know the ad, that's brand resonance that is worth billions (and since watching this, the tune hasn’t left my head).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDn1E0r5Idg

I'd like to buy the world a Coke (1971)

By the 1990s, the strapline said it all 'Can't Beat the Real Thing'. A brand so confident in its own authenticity, it practically dared you to disagree. At Christmas, the red-suited Santa that many believe Coke invented, and the trucks rolling through snowy towns, had become as much a part of Christmas as mince pies and family tension. 'Holidays Are Coming' was not an advert. It was a cultural moment.

Then came 2024. Coca-Cola commissioned three AI studios, Secret Level, Silverside AI, and Wild Card, to recreate that magic using generative AI. The result was widely described as "soulless" and "devoid of any actual creativity," with uncanny visuals and awkwardly animated faces.

Undeterred Coke went the AI route again for 2025, once again generating overwhelmingly negative feedback. An attempt to sidestep by focusing on animated animals, polar bears, penguins, badgers, sloths (in the snow?) rather than human faces, retaining the red truck and strapline. It involved around 100 people, including five AI specialists who generated and refined over 70,000 clips. And the result has again been widely described as "lifeless," "bland," and "digital slop".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ixzbQVhXtA

'Holiday's are Coming' for AI generated animals

The Business Logic

I want to be fair here. Generative AI tools can cut the cost of a large-scale global campaign by up to 60 - 70%. That is important. For a finance director, those numbers are compelling.

AI genuinely deserves its place in the marketing toolkit; for ideation, data analysis, audience segmentation, performance analytics, and the kind of heavy-lifting data processing that used to eat weeks of a creative team's time. I have seen it deliver extraordinary efficiencies in exactly those areas.

The problem is not using AI. The problem is using AI as a replacement for human storytelling at precisely the moment when your audience most needs to feel something.

As one marketing academic put it, Christmas is "a time of connection, a time of community, a time to connect.” And AI, in this context, simply is not a fit. Not yet. Possibly not ever for this specific task, because the task is fundamentally emotional.

The Authenticity Problem Is Getting Worse, Not Better

Here is where the stakes rise beyond one brand's Christmas misstep. We are witnessing a reset in how brands create value, how consumers make choices, and how the marketing and advertising industry (with continuing headlines of staff redundancies) stays relevant.

Gen Z and Millennials, the two most commercially significant audiences of the next decade, are not passive consumers of content. They are forensic ones. They crave authenticity. They have grown up with enough brand noise to develop highly calibrated radar for the difference between a brand that means something and one that is going through the motions, and they won't remember an advert from 1971. AI-generated content, when it feels hollow, does not just fail to connect. It actively signals that the brand is not really trying.

Instagram now requires AI disclosure, content carries an "AI Info" label, and failure to disclose can result in reach restrictions. And, can the industry and legislation keep up. On one level, transparency is welcome. On another, every "AI Info" tag is a small, quiet invitation to the viewer to decide whether they trust what they are seeing. For a brand built on authenticity, It's the Real Thing, remember, that is a dangerous invitation to extend.

There Is No Clean Answer Here

I want to be honest about something: there is no tidy resolution to this. The economics of AI adoption in brand, marketing, advertising are real and will only intensify. The pressure on creative budgets is real. The speed at which AI capabilities are improving is real. Brands that ignore these tools entirely will fall behind.

But Amanda Dyke, Managing Partner of Marketing and Communications at HAVAS Media, put it well: "Winning brands will elevate emotional stories that connect to deep human desires. Losing brands default to short-termism".

Is she right? I believe she is. The brands that will endure, not just survive the next efficiency cycle, but genuinely grow, will be the ones that use AI to do the analytical and operational heavy lifting, while keeping human creativity, human judgement, and human storytelling firmly in charge of the work that makes people feel something.

Authenticity is not a style choice. It is a strategic asset. And it can only be maintained when real human voice, real human oversight, and real ethical intention sit at the centre of every campaign.

The Question That Lingers

'Can't Beat the Real Thing'. That was the promise. The red trucks, the hillside harmonies, the scarves and the snow. All of it said: 'we are warm, we are human, we are real'. Two AI-generated Christmases later, that promise feels considerably more fragile.

Will Coca-Cola retain its reputation? Are the brand's foundations deep enough that these two misjudged Christmas campaigns may not undo a century of emotional equity overnight? But reputations erode in exactly this way: not in dramatic collapses, but in small, accumulated moments where audiences quietly recalibrate how much they trust you.

Will Coke need to pivot back, and soon? Will the strongest brands of the next decade be the ones that feel genuinely human? That tell real, meaningful stories, made by real people who care about the real people watching?

I think we already know the answer, at least I hope people agree with me. The harder question is whether the industry will act on it before the damage is done.