Coca-Cola’s 2025 Christmas commercial is dominated by the brand’s controversial decision to double down on Generative AI, despite widespread criticism of their 2024 campaign.
Experts and the public are divided in their opinions, focusing on a clear trade-off: technical efficiency versus emotional authenticity.
The commercial generated with Artificial Intelligence, has also created divided responses from industry observers. While there is a general observation that the ad represents a technical advancement compared to the 2024 version, critics suggest that it does not replicate the emotional resonance or “magic” associated with the company’s classic 1995 Christmas campaign. The existing conflict reflects the current industry tension between prioritizing technological efficiency and maintaining emotional authenticity in advertising.
The effort that was actually put into the AI video is not yet translating into genuinely high-quality, professional, and emotionally engaging final products suitable for large-scale commercial advertising.
The company event made a follow-up video on “how-its-created” and justifies it, but even that video was AI narrated which only added to the already stirred pot of AI generated so-called “slops”.
Opinions from the experts on the Coca-Cola 2025 Holiday Commercial
The 2025 ad, a reimagining of the classic “The Holidays Are Coming” commercial, signals AI’s irreversible change into core creative output for major global brands.
- Marketing & Business Perspective (Coca-Cola’s View)
Coca-Cola leadership views the campaign as a “transformational leap” and proof of concept for using advanced Generative AI (including tools like Google’s Veo). Pratik Thakar, Global VP and Head of Generative AI, strongly defended the move, claiming the “craftsmanship is ten times better” than the 2024 ad.
The company insists the 2024 campaign “performed exceptionally well” with general consumers in private testing, despite the online backlash. Their stance is that the “genie is out of the bottle” and AI adoption is necessary for marketing transformation.
Some analysts estimate that Generative AI tools can cut the cost of a large-scale holiday production (typically $1M to $3M) by up to 60%-70%, demonstrating a clear business incentive.
- Creative Industry & Public Backlash
This is the most consistent criticism. Viewers and creatives widely described the 2025 ad as “soulless,” “lifeless,” “bland,” and “digital slop.” They argue that the AI imitation is “missing the emotional warmth” that made the original 1995 Christmas commercial iconic.
While technically improved, the ad still exhibited “inconsistent” visuals. Some keen-eyed viewers pointed out inconsistencies with the Coca-Cola trucks (changing shape or having different wheel arrangements) and noted that the AI-generated animals look “part shiny, part plastic.”
The highest-rated comment on the ad’s YouTube upload jokingly called it “The most profitable commercial in Pepsi’s history,” indicating the brand risked alienating a significant portion of its audience.
Coca-Cola Holiday Commercial 2024 vs. 2025 (AI Focus)
The 2025 campaign reflects a direct response to the technical flaws and public criticism over the 2024 ad, resulting in a cleaner, but still controversial, result.
The comparison between the 2024 and 2025 Coca-Cola holiday commercials looks like a change in strategy from technical ambition (2024) to aesthetic course correction (2025), driven by the need to resolve the “uncanny valley” problem.
The Shift From Uncanny Humans to Stylized Animals
The change reflects Coca-Cola’s acknowledgment of AI’s technical limitations, particularly in creating emotionally resonant human figures, while doubling down on the technology for its cost and speed benefits. The “uncanny humans” refers to the phenomenon known as the “Uncanny Valley” when applied to artificial humans (in animation, robotics, or AI-generated video). Despite a year of technological leaps (citing models like OpenAI’s Sora 2 and Google’s Veo 3), the end product from Coca-Cola is still “crummy looking.”
Some experts believe that the quality between the 2024 and 2025 Coke ads differ only in metric for measuring AI video progress and the technology looks disappointing. They note that the ad still appears to be a low-quality product for the effort that was put into.
Coke’s Isolation vs. General AI
It could be that Coca-Cola’s in-house AI efforts (or their specific studio partners) are simply behind the curve, given the major public releases of advanced models like Sora 2 and Veo 3 this year. Some experts think that even these state-of-the-art models (Sora 2 and Veo 3) might not be ready for the demands of professional filmmaking – specifically, producing coherent, full-length, high-quality commercials that require consistency across many shots. The company also used Google’s own first AI-generated ad (made with Veo 3) as evidence that even the best models currently rely on limited, disconnected shots and a “cartoonish style” to avoid critical scrutiny, implying that full cinematic quality remains elusive.
