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Coca-Cola’s famous ‘Holidays Are Coming’ Christmas advert will this year be “fully created with artificial intelligence”, the brand’s marketing chief has revealed.

Later this month, the drinks brand’s Christmas TV campaign will air, featuring the familiar festive delivery lorry and Santa. But this year the ad “will launch with a new twist” the brand said.

“We recreated it by combining human ingenuity and human creativity with artificial intelligence tools to deliver the first-ever Coca-Cola ad, fully created with artificial intelligence,” Javier Meza, president of marketing and Europe CMO at The Coca-Cola Company, said at the campaign’s launch in London this week.

The brand did not reveal exactly how AI has been used in the new ad or what it would look like, but called it an “interpretation of the classic advert”.

Coca-Cola has also unveiled “a new festive digital AI experience” for consumers, triggered by scanning a QR code on a Christmas bottle or can of Coca-Cola. The scan will enable shoppers to “engage in magical conversations with Santa or a snow globe avatar to create a personalised, shareable snow globe animation, based on a personal memory” it said.

“We are learning,” Meza added. “AI is still at its early stages. It’s difficult to tell how much that’s going to change industries but it will change, and what we’re doing is really jumping in and doing things and learn, of course, with a lot of healthy debates on limits, boundaries.”

Last year, The Coca-Cola Company formed a new global services alliance with Bain & Company and ChatGPT maker OpenAI, and built an online platform – called Create Real Magic – which combines the capabilities of generative AI engines GPT-4, which produces human-like text from search engine queries, and Dall-E, which produces images based on text.

It invited fans to “create and share ‘Real Magic’ last Christmas and generate digital greeting cards based on brand assets, images and characters “through the creative prism of AI tools”.

Manolo Arroyo, Coca-Cola global chief marketing officer, said at the time the company was “just scratching the surface of what we believe will help create the industry’s most effective and efficient end-to-end marketing model”.