The Coca-Cola Company released three new AI-generated holiday ads inspired by the beverage giant’s classic 1995 “The Holidays Are Coming” commercial. Produced entirely with AI video models such as Runway and Luma Dream Machine, this represents a step forward in photorealism for AI-generated video. Predictably, the commercials have sparked some controversy among creators, who criticize the “AI sheen” and lack of realism with the AI-generated people and objects. Creator criticism is understandable given fear of job loss and frustration for impact on their craft. Yet these commercials and a growing list of others — including Dove, Under Armour, and Toys“R”Us — move the marketing industry closer to the point where AI content and advertising production becomes normalized. This means complex choices beset brands and executives looking for the best ways to leverage AI.
Indemnity For Video Is The Last Major Hurdle
The collective opinion among agencies and marketing services providers is that video tools such as Sora, Runway, and Luma Dream Machine aren’t quite ready for prime time, citing the need for incremental improvements in quality and the critical need for indemnity. The announcement of Adobe’s Firefly Video Model promises to extend commercial indemnification to video, as the company trains its models using Adobe Stock and other permissible material. Once indemnification is available for video models, marketers should anticipate others to follow suit, clearing the path for more production use cases.
Balance Automated Marketing Moments With Intuitive Ones
AI creates a new polarity: machine-produced marketing assets and campaigns as opposed to human-generated ones. Mark Sinnock, chief strategy officer for Havas, articulated this as a synthetic versus authentic tension. But like the marketing tensions that came before — brand or performance, acquisition or retention, television or digital — this new one is not a mutually exclusive decision.
There’s a place for automated, machine-made marketing in social feeds, websites, apps, and games, just as there’s also a place for intuitive, human-produced marketing experiences at retail, events, and in products. In fact, the Coca-Cola AI “The Holidays Are Coming” ads are part of a broader holiday campaign by The Coca-Cola Company that includes its 2023 “The World Needs More Santas” television commercial, a multicity truck tour, an AI digital experience, and an on-package promotion. Coca-Cola’s AI commercials aren’t the brand’s only expression of the holidays, nor are they the end of creativity as we know it but rather part of a combination of machine automation and human intuition that Forrester calls intelligent creativity.
Hold Fast To The Responsibility To Disclose AI’s Role
Most interestingly, the Coca-Cola AI commercials have sparked both controversy among creators and delight among consumers unaware of AI’s contribution to production. The context of knowing AI’s role activates bias among those who stand to lose or feel threatened by AI. But consumers shown the commercials without AI context in System1’s creative testing tool rated the ads a 5.9 out of 6, illustrating the commercials’ sheer strength.
This suggests that removing the AI-awareness context could improve the efficacy of AI-created commercials, allowing brands to realize the efficiency of their AI and automation investments. Resist this temptation. Most brands don’t enjoy over a century of holiday equity built into the Coca-Cola brand that enables consumers to oversee or overlook AI’s uncanny valley. And once advertising technology starts down the path of omission, it becomes more susceptible to abuse and misuse, contributing to the already eroding trust of the 21st-century digital media environment.
Realize Cost Efficiency Through Experience Efficacy
Among the most exciting prospect for brands and marketing executives is the potential to realize the “do more with less” remit: more content, more iterations, and more relevance for less time, less cost, and less effort. By all accounts, some agencies leveraging brand AI systems are removing 25% or more of the costs for building campaigns. But fast, cheap content creation is worthless if not manifested as effective, engaging content outputs. Alas, this is a process requiring models to learn the brand and audiences and creators to learn the models and systems. Training, experience, and experimentation are all necessary to build an AI-powered marketing operating system to produce experiences that consumers want while yielding the cost reductions that brands need.
I’ve recently added generative AI for visual content (images, video, and motion graphics) as part of my coverage. If you are a Forrester client interested in discussing AI marketing, schedule an inquiry with me.
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