I was sitting in a movie theater with my mom, freshly buttered popcorn in hand, ready to see Dave Franco star in Now You See Me 3, when our previews were rudely interrupted with Coca-Cola’s newest holiday ad. While my mom was enjoying the cute polar bears, I was scowling. When she asked me what was wrong, I told her that this was the AI commercial I hadn’t been able to escape lately.
McDonald’s and Coca-Cola seem determined to ruin our holiday cheer this year with AI. Each company has released a holiday-themed commercial, and each is terrible in its own way. And if the online backlash is anything to go by, I’m not the only one mad about the usage of AI.
McDonald’s is the newest offender, with its commercial featuring a series of holiday-themed mishaps, set to a parody of the song It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year, about how it’s actually the most terrible time of the year. The commercial is only 30 seconds long and intended only for the Netherlands, but it has already garnered so much hate online that the company has removed the video from its pages. The marketing agency behind the spot, The Sweetshop Film, still has the video up on its website.
The McDonald’s ad is very clearly AI, with short clips stitched together with a bunch of hard jump cuts. The text isn’t nearly legible, fine details are off, and it just has that AI look I’ve come to quickly recognize as an AI reporter. By contrast, the Coca-Cola commercial is a little more put-together. A Coca-Cola truck drives through a wintry landscape and into a snowy town, and forest animals awaken to follow the truck and its soda bottle contents to a lit Christmas tree in a town square. But even this video has clearly AI-generated elements.
While disappointed, I wasn’t surprised when I saw the ad and the resulting backlash. There has been a surge in creative generative AI tools, especially in the past year, with numerous AI tools built specifically for marketers. They promise to help create content, automate workflows and analyze data. A huge proportion (94%) of marketers have a dedicated AI budget, and three-quarters of them expect that budget to grow, according to Canva’s 2025 Marketing and AI report.
What is completely and utterly exhausting is huge corporations like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola choosing to rely so heavily on AI. McDonald’s made $25.9 billion in revenue in 2024, and Coca-Cola made $47.1 billion. Do these companies expect us to be OK with AI slop garbage when they could’ve spent a tiny fraction of that to hire a real animator or videographer?
These feel-good, festive commercials manage to hit upon every single controversial issue in AI, which is why they’re inspiring such strong reactions from viewers. AI content is becoming — has already become — normalized. We can’t escape chatbots online and AI slop in our feeds. McDonald’s and Coca-Cola’s use of AI is yet another sign that companies are plowing ahead with AI without truly considering how we’ll react. Like advertisements, AI is inescapable.
If AI in advertising is here to stay, it’s worth breaking down how it’s used and where we, as media consumers, don’t want to see it used. And while this is very much not a defense of Coca-Cola or AI, there is at least one thing the company did right with this specific ad.
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Spotting the AI in Coca-Cola’s ad
The Holidays Are Coming ad is a remake of Coca-Cola’s popular 1995 ad. In a behind-the-scenes video, Coca-Cola breaks down how it was created. It’s obvious where AI was used to create the animals. But I’m not sure I believe the company went “pixel by pixel” to create its fuzzy friends.
This panda bear is clearly not real footage, but it has that specific AI quality that’s part shiny, part plastic.
Coca-Cola’s AI animals don’t look realistic; they look like AI. Their fur has some detail, but those finer elements aren’t as defined as they could be. They also aren’t consistent across the animal’s body. You can see the fur gets less detailed further back on the animal. That kind of detailed work is something AI video generators struggle with, but it’s something a (human) animator likely would’ve caught and corrected.
The mama polar bear’s fur is shaggier on its cheek than on the top of its head. I feel confident in saying that no polar bear’s fur is that smooth.
The animals make overexaggerated surprised faces when the truck drives past them, their mouths forming perfect circles. That’s another sign of AI. You can see in the behind-the-scenes video that someone clicks through different AI variations of a sea lion’s nose, which is a common feature of AI programs. There’s also a glimpse of a feature that looks an awful lot like Photoshop’s generative fill. Google’s Veo video generator was definitely used at least once.
In the lower portion of the image, you can see the Veo 3 model was selected to create these videos of the Coca-Cola truck.
The company has been all-in on AI for a while, starting with a 2023 partnership with OpenAI. Even Coca-Cola’s advertising agency, Publicis Group, bragged about snatching Coca-Cola’s business with an AI-first strategy. It seems clear that the company won’t be swayed by its customers’ aversion to AI. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
All I want for Christmas is AI labels
There is exactly one thing Coca-Cola got right, and that’s the AI disclosure at the beginning of the video. It’s one thing to use AI in your content creation; it’s entirely another to lie about it. Labels are one of the best tools we have to help everyone who encounters a piece of content decipher whether it’s real or AI. Many social media apps let you simply toggle a setting before you post.
Notice the “Created by Real Magic AI” note in the bottom left corner.
It’s so easy to be clear, yet so many brands and creators don’t disclose their AI use because they’re afraid of getting hate for it. If you don’t want to get hate for using AI, don’t use it! But letting people sit and debate about whether you did or didn’t is a waste of everyone’s time. The fact that AI-generated content is becoming indistinguishable from real photos and videos is exactly why we need to be clear when it’s used.
It’s our collective responsibility as a society to be transparent with how we’re using AI. Social media platforms try to flag AI-generated content, but those systems aren’t perfect. We should appreciate that Coca-Cola didn’t lie to us about this AI-generated content. It’s a very, very low bar, but many others don’t pass it. (I’m looking at you, Mariah Carey and Sephora. Did you use AI? Just tell us.)
AI in advertising
In June, Vogue readers were incensed when the US magazine ran a Guess ad featuring an AI-generated model. Models at the time spoke out about how AI was making it harder to get work on campaigns. Eagle-eyed fans caught J.Crew using “AI photography” a month later. Toys R Us made headlines last year when it ran a weird ad with an AI giraffe, though it did share that it was made with an early version of OpenAI’s Sora.
Something that really stung about the use of AI by Guess and J.Crew is how obvious it was that AI was used in place of real models and photographers. While Coca-Cola and Toys R Us’s use of AI was equally clear, the AI animals didn’t hit quite the same. As the Toys R Us president put it, “We weren’t going to hire a giraffe.” Points for honesty?
Even so, it’s more than likely that real humans lost out on jobs in the creation of these AI ads. Coca-Cola’s commercial could’ve been created, and probably improved, if it had used animators, designers and illustrators. Job loss due to AI worries Americans, and people working in creative industries are certainly at risk. It’s not because AI image and video generators are ready to wholly replace workers. It’s because, for businesses, AI’s allure of cutting-edge efficiency offers executives an easy rationale. It’s exactly what just happened at Amazon as it laid off thousands of workers.
It’s easy to look at Coca-Cola’s and McDonald’s AI holiday ads and brush them off as another tone-deaf corporate blunder, especially when there are so many other things to worry about. But in our strange new AI reality, it’s important to highlight the quiet moments that normalize this consequential, controversial technology just as much as the breakthrough moments.
So this holiday season, I think I’ll drink a Pepsi-owned Poppi cranberry fizz soda instead of a Coke Zero.
