by David Hagenbuch - professor of marketing at Messiah University -
author of Honorable Influence - founder of Mindful Marketing
author of Honorable Influence - founder of Mindful Marketing
Coca-Cola has a long history of very memorable holiday ads, from its iconic Coke-swigging Santa to the surprisingly peaceful polar bears. This year’s campaign seeks to capture similar feelings of goodwill, warmth, and cheer but with AI-generated output, which raises the question: Should the company that’s touted its product as the real thing for more than a century now be creating advertising that’s not?
Longer-tenured consumers like me remember Coca-Cola’s longstanding tagline “The Real Thing,” which the company leaned on heavily in the 1970s following its successful 1969 campaign, “Can’t Beat The Real Thing.” Actually, the company had articulated the theme even earlier, e.g., on painted signs in the 1940s.
The notion that Coke is the real thing, or the original cola, can be traced to the late 1800s: Coke came to market in 1886, 12 years before its archrival Pepsi, giving Coca-Cola not only first-mover advantage but the right to boast that any cola coming after it was a mere facsimile.
The word real hasn’t appeared in all the company’s advertising, yet Coca-Cola has always sought to position itself as authentic and genuine – distinct branding threads that have woven their way through the company’s varied promotion, particularly in its holiday ads.
For instance, the look of the Santa Claus character that many know and love is largely a Coca-Cola creation. In 1931, the company and D'Arcy Advertising Agency tapped Haddon Sundblom, a Michigan-born Illustrator, to create images of Santa Claus for the firm’s ads.
Before then, Santa Claus was often depicted as “everything from a tall gaunt man to a spooky-looking elf.” Sundblom, however, took inspiration from Clement Clark Moore's 1822 poem "A Visit From St. Nicholas" (aka “Twas the Night Before Christmas”) to transform Santa’s image into what’s typical today – “a warm, friendly, pleasantly plump and human Santa.” Such an inviting persona meshed seamlessly with Coca-Cola’s wholesome brand image and helped to further propagate its portrayal as the real thing.
Longer-tenured consumers like me remember Coca-Cola’s longstanding tagline “The Real Thing,” which the company leaned on heavily in the 1970s following its successful 1969 campaign, “Can’t Beat The Real Thing.” Actually, the company had articulated the theme even earlier, e.g., on painted signs in the 1940s.
The notion that Coke is the real thing, or the original cola, can be traced to the late 1800s: Coke came to market in 1886, 12 years before its archrival Pepsi, giving Coca-Cola not only first-mover advantage but the right to boast that any cola coming after it was a mere facsimile.
The word real hasn’t appeared in all the company’s advertising, yet Coca-Cola has always sought to position itself as authentic and genuine – distinct branding threads that have woven their way through the company’s varied promotion, particularly in its holiday ads.
For instance, the look of the Santa Claus character that many know and love is largely a Coca-Cola creation. In 1931, the company and D'Arcy Advertising Agency tapped Haddon Sundblom, a Michigan-born Illustrator, to create images of Santa Claus for the firm’s ads.
Before then, Santa Claus was often depicted as “everything from a tall gaunt man to a spooky-looking elf.” Sundblom, however, took inspiration from Clement Clark Moore's 1822 poem "A Visit From St. Nicholas" (aka “Twas the Night Before Christmas”) to transform Santa’s image into what’s typical today – “a warm, friendly, pleasantly plump and human Santa.” Such an inviting persona meshed seamlessly with Coca-Cola’s wholesome brand image and helped to further propagate its portrayal as the real thing.
Beside his appealing personality, Sundblom Santa’s bright red hat and coat, their white trim, and his full white beard also placed him squarely on-brand in terms of colors, and the company used the holiday character heavily over the next several decades.
In 1993, Coca-Cola introduced another endearing creation – animated polar bears. Although the company had used a polar bear in a French print ad in 1922, the bears that Coca-Cola creator Ken Stewart designed in the early 1990s developed a much longer-lasting legacy.
In their first television commercial, about sixteen furry white polar bears, each holding a bottle of Coke, sat contently on the artic tundra, oohing and ahhing as they watched the aurora borealis (northern lights). Near the end of the 30-second spot, they sipped their sodas, smacked their lips, and let out one more collective ahh. The commercial culminated with a close-up of one particularly pleasant bear with plump cheeks and friendly eyes that seemed to smile for the camera as it held its frosty soda bottle high.
In another 90-second spot from around 2005, the bears crashed the Christmas party of a pack of penguins that were dancing to the Beach Boys’ holiday favorite “Little Saint Nick.” At first the penguins were startled, but after one of their chicks shared a bottle of Coke with a bear cub, everyone smiled and happily joined the festivities. Leave it to Coca-Cola to make even one of the world’s fiercest predators fit its brand.
Even as the polar bears’ popularity grew, in 1995 the company unfurled another memorable campaign called “Holidays are Coming” that featured a seemingly endless caravan of light-bedazzled and ornately decorated 18-wheel big rigs sporting Coca-Cola’s trademark script lettering and larger-than-life images of its affable Santa Claus.
The spectacular line of long haulers rolled down country roads to the chant of “holidays are coming,” lighting up forests and bridges as they passed and pleasantly surprising a variety of delighted onlookers. Although certain parts of these mid-1990s ads leveraged special effects, much of what viewers saw was real, including the people in the spots.
Thirty years later, these “Holidays are Coming” ads are the inspiration for the company’s new AI-generated campaign, which carry the same name and decked-out trucks but haven’t engendered the same warm response as the original ads.
In 1993, Coca-Cola introduced another endearing creation – animated polar bears. Although the company had used a polar bear in a French print ad in 1922, the bears that Coca-Cola creator Ken Stewart designed in the early 1990s developed a much longer-lasting legacy.
In their first television commercial, about sixteen furry white polar bears, each holding a bottle of Coke, sat contently on the artic tundra, oohing and ahhing as they watched the aurora borealis (northern lights). Near the end of the 30-second spot, they sipped their sodas, smacked their lips, and let out one more collective ahh. The commercial culminated with a close-up of one particularly pleasant bear with plump cheeks and friendly eyes that seemed to smile for the camera as it held its frosty soda bottle high.
In another 90-second spot from around 2005, the bears crashed the Christmas party of a pack of penguins that were dancing to the Beach Boys’ holiday favorite “Little Saint Nick.” At first the penguins were startled, but after one of their chicks shared a bottle of Coke with a bear cub, everyone smiled and happily joined the festivities. Leave it to Coca-Cola to make even one of the world’s fiercest predators fit its brand.
Even as the polar bears’ popularity grew, in 1995 the company unfurled another memorable campaign called “Holidays are Coming” that featured a seemingly endless caravan of light-bedazzled and ornately decorated 18-wheel big rigs sporting Coca-Cola’s trademark script lettering and larger-than-life images of its affable Santa Claus.
The spectacular line of long haulers rolled down country roads to the chant of “holidays are coming,” lighting up forests and bridges as they passed and pleasantly surprising a variety of delighted onlookers. Although certain parts of these mid-1990s ads leveraged special effects, much of what viewers saw was real, including the people in the spots.
Thirty years later, these “Holidays are Coming” ads are the inspiration for the company’s new AI-generated campaign, which carry the same name and decked-out trucks but haven’t engendered the same warm response as the original ads.
Produced by three different AI studios, the three new AI-generated ads, have received some very frosty reviews. As the New York Times has reported, one critic called the ads “slop” that “ruins the Christmas spirit,” while another claimed the company has significantly lowered its standards with the “heartbreaking” campaign, and a third, Alan Hirsch, the creator of the animated TV show Gravity Falls, suggested Coca-Cola’s signature red represents “the blood of out-of-work artists.”
So, why risk messing with a good thing and the Real Thing by using AI to produce the new ads? A main motivation was likely money, as Garrett Sloan writing for AdAge suggested: “Backers of the technology are excited about how it could bring more creative tools to more people, more cheaply.”
It’s easy to imagine that Coca-Cola’s original “Holidays are Coming” ads, with their elaborately decorated trucks, remote outdoor settings, and abundant special effects, were very expensive to produce – probably millions of dollars – and took a long time to script, schedule, shoot, and edit. Why shouldn’t the company leverage technology’s cutting edge to save time and trim expenses?
Asking that question seems to fly in the face of the conclusion of my last Mindful Marketing article, “Does Human Made Matter?” in which I deduced, Yes, it matters. So, why was AI use out-of-bounds a few weeks ago but in-play now?
While some suggest that AI shouldn’t be used for anything and others argue that all AI use is acceptable, I stand between the two extremes. I’m firmly in the middle but will lean a little closer to one side or the other based on the efficacy of the application and the ethics of the situation.
As the last Mindful Marketing article suggested, many value originality in art and appreciate a sense of personal connection with the art’s creator, such as ones stemming from shared life experiences. Human connections and true originality are both things that are difficult if not impossible for AI to replicate.
On the other hand, most people probably don’t mind if AI generated a promotional email they received or was used to create a billboard they read.
The ultimate purpose of most advertising is to sell products, so although advertising is part science and part art, it doesn’t have the same thresholds for originality and personal connection as pure art does. Most people probably feel a deeper human connection with a favorite painting or song than they do with a Coca-Cola promotional piece. The notion that there’s a different standard for commercial content opens the door for AI use in advertising.
Someone who sees firsthand the effective and ethical use that marketing can make of AI is Matt Caylor, Account Director with Martin Communications, Inc., located near Harrisburg, PA. While he warns against blindly accepting AI output, which can be dangerous because it’s not always correct, Caylor also has experienced many productive uses of the technology including copy iteration, data analysis, and design assistance, as he explains:
“The technology can save time in editing and design, taking some of the mundane or tedious work off our plates. It can work as a partner in the initial iteration of messaging, often acting as an agent to bounce ideas off. It can be an agile assistant that reviews and analyzes large data sets, crunches numbers, or helps develop new queries.”
Does human input matter to Caylor and others at Martin Communications? It surely does, and like many others working in marketing, Caylor and his colleagues are continually learning how to effectively integrate their own insights with the technology tools – just as humans have done for millennia.
So, does it matter if Coca-Cola’s “Holidays are Coming” ads aren’t the Real Thing. Yes and no.
It matters in that consumers’ perceptions, whether correct or not, are their reality. For instance, some viewers seem to believe that all the people in the ads are AI-generated, even though Pratik Thakar, Coca-Cola’s VP and global head of generative AI, says at least some are not. Still, when people perceive a little AI in an ad, their tendency is to extrapolate that everything in it is AI.
On the other hand, Coca-Cola is only doing what Caylor and individuals in many other fields do each day – use AI selectively and responsibly to leverage their own time and talents. As Thakar explains: “Our human creatives make decisions and use AI as a tool.”
There’s nothing inherently wrong with Coca-Cola’s using AI as a tool to help create its new “Holidays are Coming” ads. However, given individuals’ current impressions of AI, because people have special expectations for authenticity around the Holidays, and since Coca-Cola has built a reputation for realism, the company’s AI use in the ads may have been too much too soon, or a case of Simple-Minded Marketing.
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