Coca-Cola’s new AI-generated Christmas ad is as bad as you’d expect
Coca-Cola’s new AI-generated Christmas ad is as bad as you’d expect
Toys’R’Us released a TV ad generated with Sora a few months ago. Everyone loathed it and the ad caused massive brand damage. Toys’R’Us executives considered it a huge success. [YouTube; NBC] You ne…
This is probably the least surprising thing ever.
CocaCola is like the symbol of capitalism. Everything they produce is corporate slop. GenAI is a perfect fit -- soulless, artless, hastily slapped together bright pictures that ultimately don't matter and carry no value. The world is not better with CocaCola ads, and it would be no worse without them. They're just there, to be lost in time, forgotten. Like tears in the rain.
I'm going insane looking at comments praising the 1995 TV spot, going on about how it makes them teary-eyed and such, and how the AI remake is a travesty. That shit already looked like if you put a Norman Rockwell artbook in the blender, drank the mixture and subsequently got sick on the Vegas Strip.
No shot is over two seconds, because AI video can’t keep it together longer than that. Animals and snowmen visibly warp their proportions even over that short time. The trucks’ wheels don’t actually move. You’ll see more wrong with the ad the more you look.
Not to mention the weird AI lighting that makes everything look fake and unnatural even in the ad's dreamlike context, and also that it's the most generic and uninspired shit imaginable.
No shot is over two seconds, because AI video can’t keep it together longer than that.
Honestly I think they should have gone full cursed. I think it would have been far more amusing and might actually have garnered them some kudos at least from the terminally online.
This is crappy and weird but it could have been worse: unlike the Toy's Are U's advert they wisely decided not to include any human. Which in turn makes the caravan of trucks look eerie and sinister. You can't win them all.
there are apparently two other prospective ads that do include AI renditions of human actors and they're as bad.
But won't someone think of all the extra bonus monies they can pay themselves as a result of avoiding paying human salaries? (Ironically, not even in this one bc the AI was so horrible that it required extensive clean up)
I mean it's basic and boring but, considering the production cost was probably (a lot?) less than $1,000, compared to the $5,000+ it would've cost if filmed/animated traditionally, that seems like a win. And the average viewer isn't even gonna notice. In fact, they're getting plenty of free publicity for using AI to make it thanks to articles like these
I think your prices are off by about 1000x, but your main argument holds up.
My brain is stuck on 90s prices (I ran an advertisement company as a toddler)
In fact, they’re getting plenty of free publicity for using AI to make it thanks to articles like these
good thing there’s no such thing as bad publicity, otherwise this shit would be fucking embarrassing
I don't know the actual budget, but I think it probably cost much more than 1kUSD, though probably still less than real human work would cost.
It's important to note that no shit could last more than a second or two because after that the generated video starts to much more noticably have errors. So at minimum you still need editors (plus the music needed to be composited, etc). Also, as the article notes, all the logos needed to be added in post as well because GenAI cannot reliably do text or logos. With that in mind, I'd guess there was probably a significant amount of "cleaning up" that had to be done in post as well.
With all that said and done, I'm sure the commercial was not exactly dirt cheap, but it WAS probably still cheaper than having dignity and paying humans.
What's actually kind of wild, though, is a lot of these shots just look like bland stock imagery. And since they couldn't have any cohesion between shots because of GenAI's own limitations, the majority of these shots could have been replaced with stock footage and they probably would have only needed to CGI a few different shots...
What if I told you that the goal was not to make a good product, but to increase shareholder valuation?
In that case, all the "problems" disappear in light of chasing after the singular goal.