What would you have done? — Five specialists, 70,000 clips, and trust wearing thin

For its Christmas campaign, Coca-Cola had to decide how to produce the film that embodies its end-of-year ritual. Three options were on the table: (A) hand it entirely to generative AI, a small team of five specialists producing more than 70,000 clips in a month; (B) a hybrid approach, AI to move faster but human creatives leading the film; (C) traditional production, slower and more expensive.

Coca-Cola chose (A), two years running. Each time, the imagery set off a wave of rejection. Content branded “soulless,” calls for a boycott, anger at seeing creatives pushed aside. Its head of generative AI, for his part, defended the experiment: “the genie is out of the bottle.” The efficiency gain was real; what frayed was the trust and attachment the content was meant to build. The lesson reaches well beyond advertising: the real question is not whether AI can produce a piece of content, but whether it should handle what carries your promise to the customer. In a small or midsize company, sort your content before you automate: generative AI for internal, lower-stakes material, and a human review for anything a customer reads as your brand’s voice.

Source: Forbes and Euronews, “Coca-Cola’s AI-generated Christmas ad sparks backlash (again),” November 2025.