Coca-Cola is facing its second straight year of backlash from its AI-generated holiday commercials.
The company's new seasonal ad once again features its famous red trucks, cartoony animals, and a Santa Claus reveal, all produced almost entirely with generative AI tools by the studio Secret Level.
While Coke’s Global VP and Head of Generative AI, Pratik Thakar, told The Hollywood Reporter that the "craftsmanship on this ad is ten times better" this year, the reception from many creatives has been just as frosty. Critics are again raising environmental and labor concerns, questioning the trade-off between AI-driven speed and genuine artistic value.
To understand this growing divide between brands embracing AI and the creatives who feel threatened by it, I spoke with SmarterX and Marketing AI Institute founder and CEO Paul Roetzer on Episode 179 of The Artificial Intelligence Show.
As the online criticism mounts, Roetzer says Coke has to simply ignore the noise.
“I think you just have to own this,” he says.
Coca-Cola and Secret Level are standing by the new ad, arguing that the technology has evolved and that human artistry is still central to the process.
Roetzer notes that the ad will likely be seen by two different audiences. The general public, who will probably think, ‘This is a really good ad. That was beautiful,” he says. The other audience, the one hyper-aware of AI’s impact, are creatives flooding social media asking about the training data and ethics.
“Coke is going to go out into that frontier. They're going to piss off 40 percent of the population,” Roetzer says. “And then at some point everyone's going to just stop being pissed and they're just going to accept that this has evolved creativity.”
The backlash is ooted in real fears about job displacement in the creative industry. Jason Zada, founder of the AI studio behind the ad, told The Hollywood Reporter that while the ad used a smaller team (around 20 people instead of 50+), the efficiencies allow for more creative output, not less.
Roetzer, who comes from a writing background and has family members who are artists, says he understands the tension.
“I get it. This is not a black and white thing,” he says. “There are things that are messy and uncomfortable.”
This messy reality puts creatives who do use these new tools in a difficult position, caught between innovation and ethics.
“There's no perfect answer,” Roetzer says. “The creatives are using the tools available to them and they're doing incredible things with those tools. Is it their fault that they're trained on data that was stolen? Are they just not supposed to use the tools?”
While the debate rages on, the business world is moving ahead. Coke's generative AI head was unambiguous, telling The Hollywood Reporter that AI is central to the company's "major marketing transformation" and that "the genie is out of the bottle."
Roetzer agrees that this is the new reality, regardless of the discomfort. He frames it as a pragmatic business decision for every company, including his own.
“I can't change how they train the models,’’ he said. “I can choose as a company, are we going to use the models or aren't we? And we choose to use the models.”
Not using them, he explained, doesn't seem like a sustainable business decision.
What does seem clear is that AI's place in creative work is no longer speculative. And the world's biggest brands are diving in.