In this blog I’m going to look at the current trend of using AI within brand marketing and advertising. I’m going to focus on the 2024 CocaCola ‘Holidays are coming’ campaign. We’ll look at the pro’s and the con’s of what has been created and ask if this approach is the way forward?
The original ad
I’m sure that I don’t need to remind you, but here’s the original ad from 1995. Now let’s dig into this and find out what was going on and why it’s important.
The concept of trucks delivering coke at Christmas, to everyone around the world in a truck convoy was an idea developed by people for people – this is important!
The team at WB Doner (the agency responsible) spent a lot of time thinking about the product and what would connect it with peoples values during the holiday season. They put together an idea that’s not based in reality, but is plausible enough, given the feeling of the season, that this ‘could happen’.
They presented the idea to the marketing team at Coke, in a person to person piece of communication, where the folks involved were using their imagination, creativity and vocabulary to describe the vision for this ad. This is real-life multi-media, not a sign of a computer or any device involved at this point, this is sketches and a script written by a person and an in-person group chat (sounds crazy to think it would be anything else, but look where we are?)
Once approved it moves into production, where the human creativty really takes flight, camera angles, movements and gestures, the visual story telling narrative, don’t get me wrong, much of what we see was scripted and filmed using actors with a light sprinkling (thought I’d get into the spirit of the season) of computer tricky adding a touch of magic here and there – mainly lighting effects. The jingle was written by a person, sung, performed and recorded by people. I’m going to stop now as I think you get my point.
The result is not perfect. THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT! Perfection does not exist, it is not real and should never be the goal – I will explain why later.
The 2024 ad
I don’t know who led the holiday campaign this year within the Coke team (and to be honest it really doesn’t matter) because at some point, probably pretty early in the year, the marketing team at Coke will have been working on ‘what to do for the holiday season in 2024’, it might not have had that exact title, but it will have been something along those lines. No doubt they looked back at which campaigns had worked well in the past, customer sentiment for the old ads and I’m sure the ‘holidays are coming’ campaign was well remembered – I’ll get on why in a moment.
So they (Coke marketing team) have a kind of Top 10 ads that they’d had previous success with. Then tasked with what to do for 2024, someone suggests asking Chat GPT or a n other AI what it would do. Surprise, surprise it comes back and says, remake what’s been successful before. That makes sense and SHOULD have been what the Coke team were thinking too. Then they embark on using AI to generate the entire ad because using AI is ‘on trend’.
I can also hear the post rationalisation from someone within the team, justifying this route because it will keep them in touch with their younger customers. Sorry existing established gluggers of the fizzy brown juice (it’s a really good metal cleaner), they’ve already had a lot of your money, they really don’t care much about you now and are looking for fresh meat.
And in a small concession to those already addicted the FBJ (fizzy, brown juice), we’re (CocaCola) playing the nostalgia card, you’ll remember this ad from the first time around. Lets’ bring back those warm fuzzy memories of sugar rushes gone by.
Why the AI version fails
I’ll keep this really simple, it’s too perfect. There said it, job done.
Ok, let me explain the thinking behind this. The renderings are impressive but it’s all perfect – lighting, rendering, movement. So perfect that you can tell it’s been created by a machine. A soulless machine that works in zero’s and one’s. It doesn’t understand emotion (yet). It applies it’s knowledge to the task and executes it to the best of it’s ability, working to the parameters it knows and answering the questions you ask of it (sometimes).
Here’s a few examples…
Here are a few details of the execution that are pure perfectionism. Whilst the characters look human they all have a noticeable ‘air brushed’ feel to their features, kind like the 1920’s and 30’s photography before colour film was invented when the colour was worked in afterwards by hand and people always had ‘rosey’ cheeks. Yes it still feels fake, even when an AI does it. Why? Simple, because it is fake.
The ad feels ‘Over the top’, there are no blemishes, no imperfections, therefore it’s not real. It’s fake and that’s bad news for any brand (more about this later on). Because the ad was created using AI and ‘anything is possible’, the content becomes unreal to the point of ‘Reaching’.
What I mean here is this, we have polar bears, dear and other wild animals, all looking at the trucks. I get the sentiment, the cute factor that they are trying to get into the ad. Reality check, this is supposed to be delivery trucks working their way through the forest to bring you your coke. I think someone within the organisation should have spoken up about mixed messages here. One second we are showing you cute wild animals, the next a convoy of heavy polluting trucks. It doesn’t take a genius to see that these are not happy bed fellows.
The result of things like this and the other elements I’ve already mentioned means that when you view the ad, something that feels ‘weird and uncomfortable’ The watching experience isn’t comfortable and there’s a very good reason for that. Spoiler alert it’s perfectionism, therefore it’s not real, it’s fake!
To add insult to injury, this ad is a direct copy of the original. This is what AI is really good at – copying. It can only learn from what’s come before. It doesn’t understand how to develop new in the same cognitive way that we do as people.
There’s no magic
The campaigns that have had success within this space have always had a feeling of magic. It’s the very essence of good storytelling and it’s a human creation. But magic isn’t perfect, in fact it’s far from it in most instances. It tends to make some elements fantastic and totally miss others, it’s flawed which connects with us as people, because we’re also flawed, perfectly imperfect. Not good at repeating the same process here there and everywhere, because we’re human.
For me this is at the heart of what’s wrong here. The ad doesn’t feel magical, even though the script has become more fantastical then the original. I’ve already mentioned several reasons why, but by far the biggest is ‘there’s no room for the imperfect person’ in this ad.
If there’s one thing every business should have learned a long time ago, it’s be honest, be real. Creating fantasy has it’s place within film, gaming and entertainment, but when you look at the really successful projects and series within all of these spaces they have real human imperfections built-in to them, simple human flaws that allow us, as people to connect with them, because there’s a way in, a space has been left for us to feel like we ‘could’ be part of that if we wanted. AI doesn’t understand this (yet), it’s simply a machine carrying out a task and that’s where this fails.
If humanising, using genuine human behaviours, thought and creativity is something that you’re interested in developing for your business, drop us a line.
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