By Katie Deighton

Coca-Cola has taken another stab at artificial-intelligence-generated holiday ads after last year's attempts drew criticism from creative professionals over their execution and the technology's potential to hurt jobs.

The results show improvement on the execution, at least, as Madison Avenue continues to fret about its creative future.

The wheels of the red delivery trucks in Coke's new "Holidays Are Coming" commercials look as though they're all turning, rather than gliding like some did last year. The shiny-faced, spaced-out humans of 2024 have ceded their place to an expanded host of critters, letting Coke dodge the "uncanny valley" where nearly real simulations of people wind up unsettling viewers.

Coca-Cola declined to comment on the cost of the campaign, which includes two different commercials made by two artificial-intelligence studios that it said will air in around 140 countries. But Chief Marketing Officer Manolo Arroyo said it was cheaper and speedier to produce than a typical, non-AI production.

"Before, when we were doing the shooting and all the standard processes for a project, we would start a year in advance," Arroyo said. "Now, you can get it done in around a month."

Coca-Cola is one of many advertisers enchanted by generative AI's speed and cost efficiencies despite some people's vocal distaste for the technology and its potential to make jobs in the creative industries redundant.

The animator and writer Alex Hirsch last year responded to last year's AI ads by declaring that Coca-Cola is "red because it's made from the blood of out-of-work artists."

And advertisers such as the retailer Aerie have made their rejection of AI in photos and videos a public-relations campaign in itself. That could curry favor with the 46% of consumers in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia who said they're not OK with AI in ads, according to a January poll from research company Attest.

But that number is also down from 49% a year earlier.

Other advertisers are pushing ahead. Thirty percent of connected-TV commercials, social videos and online videos this year are being built or enhanced using generative AI tools, up from 22% in 2024, according to trade group the Interactive Advertising Bureau. That figure will rise to 39% in 2026, the bureau predicts.

Tech giant Google last week unveiled its first completely AI-generated spot .

And despite the criticism, Coke's 2024 holiday ads scored very highly among regular consumers, according to System1, a U.K.-based company that tests the effectiveness of ads, which suggested people either didn't know or didn't care about the use of AI.

Arroyo and other marketers are quick to point out that generative AI ads aren't just created by pressing a few buttons. In a behind-the-scenes film shared by Coke, a voice-over discusses the "team of artists" who "work frame-by-frame, often pixel-by-pixel" to touch up and tweak the festive images generated by the AI.

Coca-Cola, which Chief Executive James Quincy said on an October earnings call will restructure its workforce next year as it brings in more AI and agentic tech, has always staffed its holiday campaigns with relatively small teams, Arroyo said. Around 100 people worked on the new holiday campaign across Coca-Cola, its advertising agency WPP and the AI creative studios Silverside and Secret Level, a number on par with the AI-free productions of the past, the company said.

"The core of this, the engine of this, is human storytellers," Arroyo said.

It looks like fewer of those storytellers will be around in the future.

Only five AI specialists were needed to prompt, turn out and refine more than 70,000 video clips to make Silverside's holiday ad for Coke, according to another behind-the-scenes film.

Employees aged 20 to 24 who tend to fill junior roles and internships are already disappearing from the advertising industry because of the adoption of AI, as well as the consolidation of firms and weaker revenues, according to an Adweek analysis of U.S. labor data. Marketers in the past week have been among the droves of U.S. workers laid off at Amazon.com, Paramount and other companies, which say that AI can handle some of their work.

Write to Katie Deighton at katie.deighton@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 03, 2025 08:29 ET (13:29 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.