Santa Claus in a new AI Coca-Cola holiday ad made by Secret Level. The Coca-Cola Company Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment This year's Coca-Cola's AI ad-drop was supposed to be different. Different than last year's bashing, what with smoother tech. Different from last year's controversy, what with more consumer acceptance. The critics, producers hoped, might be subdued. So much for that. Several days after the animated "holidays are coming" spot debuted, the backlash among the creative class seems as as strong as, well, when Coke released its AI "holidays are coming" spot last year. Related Stories Business Netflix Claims 190 Million Ad-Tier Viewers Worldwide Under New Metric Business Coca-Cola Is Trying Another AI Holiday Ad. Executives Say This Time Is Different The Evil and Good Wife creator Robert King posted on X that the animal-centric animation "worked better as ZOOTOPIA" and suggested Disney might want to think about suing Coke in addition to Midjourney (unlikely). The anti-AI Hollywood concept artist Reid Southen called it "Stupid, ugly trash." Another illustrator, Karla Ortiz, called for a boycott. And the Gravity Falls writer Alex Hirsch, who had sharp words for the ad last year, returned to the well this November, noting that "'the genie is out of the bottle, and you're not going to put it back in' - your boss firing you on Christmas," citing a line from a Coke exec in The Hollywood Reporter's story from Monday. This kind of criticism was something the maker of the main ad (there are several versions), an L.A.-based AI studio founder named Jason Zada, was prepared for. Zada, whose company Secret Level was also behind last year's ad, believes people aren't understanding the creativity that goes into the work, which includes many animated animals and an AI Santa Claus generated by archival Coca-Cola drawings. Speaking to THR on Friday just a few days before the ad's release, he made an insistent case that producing an AI commercial is at heart no different from making any animated film. The conversation was edited for brevity and clarity. First, tell me about the reaction to last year's ad. Did it surprise you? We did the Coca-Cola spot and it was met with very mixed reaction. Because I think at the time it was the sort of thing a lot of normal consumers weren't on board with yet. But the last year has been crazy. There are things upsetting Hollywood, but the brand side has gone all in in an enormous way. The Coca-Cola ad was a wake up call to a lot of people in marketing that it was OK to do it this way. It shifted the conversation: There's a really traditional way to do it and there is a brand new way to do it. Do you understand the criticism of people who say that the brand new way is really just a repurposing of the old way - that LLMs aren't really a departure, just a rehash? There's a lot of human artistry. This new ad was done by 20 people. There was a lot of hand-drawn character designs that went into it, a lot more sketching and world-building. More than last year but less than an ad like this normally would have, right? Yes, but animation is always all about artistry. AI could do some things well but it can't do everything well. There's a lot more that goes in than most people think in terms of hand-drawing characters and animating them and all the details that go into a production. It's not just saying a series of words and pressing buttons. I hope people can see that. We do a lot of fine tuning, a lot of very specific things to make the animation just like traditional animation. I have a 20-year-old daughter going to school for 3D animation; she's my toughest critic. Human creativity is at the core of what we do. Like this Coca-Cola ad, or the will.i.am piece [another Secret Level project]. You're making the argument that AI is a tool, basically - it's just a device like any other piece of tech. It's just using technology to help the human creativity and collaboration. We work with a global network of artists to pull these campaigns together. These campaigns are very time consuming. AI just gives us the opportunity to do it a lot faster. With traditional animation a piece like this would take months and months. This took less than a month. The efficiencies you could get with AI - we could iterate faster and move faster. We could move at the speed of culture. Critics would say that speed isn't really speed - it's just using what other people did only you didn't hire them. The world is not moving slower. If you need a campaign last-minute there's no way to do a massive project at scale without AI. It simply wouldn't get done. Hollywood moves super slow and the brand side moves super fast. We play on both sides of the field so it's interesting to see the difference. But efficiency at scale is becoming more of a s