One of the buzziest campaigns of the holiday season so far is Coca-Cola’s artificial intelligence (AI) reboot of its classic ad, “Holidays Are Coming.”

Since the rise of generative AI, the technology has invoked fear from some in the industry who worry it could harm creative jobs. But the Coke ad creators at Silverside AI, an innovation lab part of agency Pereira O’Dell, say AI enhanced the human creativity behind one of the world’s most famous campaigns.

Coca-Cola’s global holiday campaign this year includes the “Holidays Are Coming” remake, its Christmas Truck Tour, the second annual “The World Needs More Santas” ad, and a festive digital AI experience that lets people create personalized snow globe animations.

This isn’t Coca-Cola’s first AI-driven holiday push. Last year, its “Create Real Magic” campaign included a feature that let people make digital holiday cards with generative AI.

However, this year, AI played an even bigger role to reimagine Coca-Cola’s holiday campaign for a modern era. The AI version of “Holidays Are Coming” nods to the original while making the campaign more personalized and relevant to audiences around the world, Silverside AI’s leaders explained.

PJ Pereira, co-founder and partner at Silverside AI and co-founder and creative chairman at Pereira O’Dell, and Rob Wrubel, co-founder and managing partner at Silverside AI, lifted the lid on the creative process and what they learned along the way.

A modern twist on a holiday icon

Since its debut in 1995, Coca-Cola’s Christmas Truck has become synonymous with the holiday season. Earlier this year, the brand called on Silverside AI to create “a modern interpretation” of the truck, Pereira told ADWEEK.

Silverside AI turned to generative AI platforms including Stable Diffusion, Pactto, DALL-E, ChatGPT, and its own tool Director Magic to create the ad, in a process that felt more like “software development” than traditional filmmaking, said Pereira.

Using AI sped up the creation process and allowed creatives to see ideas come to life instantly. Silverside AI “produced a rough draft of the spot within three days of one of our first meetings [with the client],” Wrubel recalled.

“The moment you have a process where creatives can immediately see ideas come to life in real time, it transforms the creative process altogether. It’s a revolutionary thing,” Pereira said.

AI also made the process more collaborative, with Silverside AI able to send edits and updates to the client nearly every day rather than every couple of weeks, Wrubel said.

Navigating new challenges

One potential hitch came late in the process, when the Coca-Cola client asked Silverside AI if it could develop customized versions of the spot for various cities and global markets.

“Our immediate reaction was, ‘of course not, it’s too late,’” Pereira said. “But then we said, ‘wait – this isn’t the old world anymore. Maybe we can.’”

Within a few days, Silverside AI delivered 110 different versions of the spot, including 27 key market localizations that feature skylines customized to the cities in which they will air.

While AI can make the creative process faster and more flexible, it also presents challenges. One is keeping up with the fast-evolving technology – new AI tools emerged from the time Silverside AI started working on the ad in June to its launch this month, said Pereira.

AI also does not allow the same “level of precision and control” in post-production, he added, explaining that animators adjusted and polished the ad to match Coca-Cola’s color scheme, logo, and the look of the trucks.

Nevertheless, Pereira praised AI for simplifying project management tasks that often eat into creatives’ time: “When technology with the power of AI steps into the process, creativity becomes way more important than project management.”

“For the last five years, I’ve been hearing creatives complain about doing more for less money, that things have become impossible,” he continued. “It’s not impossible anymore. AI allows us to take great ideas that would have died without the budgets and bring them to life, for multiple ideas to get made, to elevate the level of everything.”

As Coca-Cola’s iconic campaign debuts its AI makeover to the world, it is indicative of where AI could take advertising, Wrubel said.

“The quality and ability for creatives to generate breakthrough creativity is only going to get better,” he said. “This is a journey, and the only way to move on the journey is to use the tools and make things.”

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