Alex Vadukul, Coca-Cola’s Holiday Ads Trade the ‘Real Thing’ for Generative A.I., NYTimes, Nov. 20, 2024. The opening two paragraphs:
With temperatures dropping, nights growing longer and decorations starting to appear in store windows, the holidays are on their way. One of the season’s stalwarts, however, is feeling a little less cozy for some people: Coca-Cola, known for its nostalgia-filled holiday commercials, is facing backlash for creating this year’s ads with generative artificial intelligence.
The three commercials, which pay tribute to the company’s beloved “Holidays Are Coming” campaign from 1995, feature cherry-red Coca-Cola trucks driving through sleepy towns on snowy roads at night. The ads depict squirrels and rabbits peeking out to watch the passing caravans and a man being handed an ice-cold bottle of cola by Santa Claus.
And then:
The internet pile-on arrived swiftly as consumers decried the commercials as uncanny valleyesque perversions of the company’s classic ads.
“Coca-Cola just put out an ad and ruined Christmas,” Dylan Pearce, one of the campaign’s many critics, said on TikTok, adding, “To put out slop like this just ruins the Christmas spirit.”
“This is legit heartbreaking,” another user, De’Vion Hinton, posted on X. “Coca Cola has been the gold standard in branding and advertising for decades.”
Alex Hirsch, an animator and the creator of the Disney series “Gravity Falls,” expressed a sentiment that other creative professionals have shared online, noting that the brand’s signature red represented the “blood of out-of-work artists.”
The company, however, is sticking by the ads.
“The Coca-Cola Company has celebrated a long history of capturing the magic of the holidays in content, film, events and retail activations for decades around the globe,” a spokesman for the company said in a statement provided to The New York Times. “This year, we crafted films through a collaboration of human storytellers and the power of generative A.I.”
Ah, remember back in the previous century when Coke decided to revamp its formula and produce New Coke? Ah, those were the good old days. But the best days are yet to come!
There's more at the link. Me? I think I'm going to have a good old Diet Coke.
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