The tape arrived from Atlanta in 1997: a broadcast U-matic with that year’s Coca-Cola Christmas film on it. It would go to air in a sweltering Sydney summer. On the screen, trucks drove through snow.
Our instinct in the Sydney office was that it would not connect. A film featuring festooned Coca-Cola delivery trucks that had worked in an American winter would surely mean little in an Australian summer. We wanted approval to make our own, and approval needed evidence. So we tested the film, expecting it to fail.
People loved it.
They were not responding to the snow, and its absence from their own Christmas did not trouble them at all. They were responding to wonder.
I have thought about that test all week, because now we seem to have two advertising traditions in early November: who got Christmas right, and who used AI.
Back then we thought the problem was the snow. Today the industry thinks the problem is the AI. Both times the professionals were arguing about a feature of the film. The audience was judging something else: whether the brand had cared enough to give them something worth the interruption.
Put another way: whether they cared to find the right gift, or just bought a voucher.
What was on that tape
“Holidays Are Coming” first aired in 1995. The shoot used three real trucks, each carrying more than 30,000 bulbs by Coca-Cola’s own count. Then the footage went to Industrial Light & Magic, the Star Wars effects house, to be made brighter than bulbs can manage and turn three trucks into a magical convoy.
Two years earlier we had polar bears drinking a Coke and marvelling at the Northern Lights. It was built by Rhythm & Hues using the most advanced computer animation then available. This was 1993, the year of Jurassic Park and two years before Toy Story.
So two of the most loved Christmas films in advertising were also the most technological advertising of their day. Nobody complained that technology was used. Coca-Cola was applauded for it: for the wonder, the craft, and above all the care that this early Christmas gift brought into people’s living rooms.
Claiming the hand-made
Coca-Cola remade the trucks with generative AI in 2024 and 2025, and was criticised both times in some quarters. A third AI outing is on air this season.
In the face of this, much of the industry has replied in clay, felt and pencil. Levi’s shot a claymation film at four hours of filming for every second on screen. Prada hired a veteran Disney animator and put the method in the title: “Drawing Prada: Animated by Hand”.
Then Dior. Its six-minute film “Christian Dior’s Night in Color”, directed by Sylvain Chomet, was introduced by the house as “all hand-drawn”. Within a day viewers were pausing it frame by frame. They found a finger with a joint too many, some warped lettering, and a misspelt name on a dog’s tag. Chomet and his producer say artists drew every image, and that an automated system filled in a small share of the frames in between. Nobody has shown otherwise. It has not helped.
Mark Ritson argued in Adweek this week that AI-or-not is advertising’s most pointless argument. He is right that the clean line between hand and machine has gone, and right that Dior’s mistake was the boast, not the tool.
I would stop short of “pointless”. The public is asking the wrong question, but for the right reason.
And those of us who say “it’s only a tool” owe the other side a concession. Most of the AI in Christmas advertising so far has been there to save money. When Coca-Cola’s European marketing chief explained the 2024 film, he said the brief came first and the technology second, and then described the AI route as efficient: a saving of time and money.
AI let them put more on the screen for less, and more is not the same as wonder. That’s the issue.
Why the applause turned
Three things changed between the bears and today’s backlash.
The company the tool keeps. In 1993 computer animation belonged solely to the big screen. Coca-Cola was handing an ad break something people had only seen at the cinema. Generative AI keeps the opposite company. Its public face is the content farm and the bottomless feed of slop.
Scarcity. Almost nobody could do in 1993 what Rhythm & Hues did. Anyone with a subscription can generate a snowy truck today. A tool everyone has proves nothing about how hard you tried. Effects are democratised.
Reach versus save. The bears used technology to do what could not otherwise be done. The 2024 trucks used technology to do again, for less, what had already been done in 1995. Same company, same kind of tool, opposite intent.
Notice what did not change. Viewers in 1993 never gave Coca-Cola credit for technology. They gave credit for wonder. In April I ended The Human Canvas on three words about AI and creativity: “Human first.” This is the same point from the audience’s side of the screen.
What people are actually judging
They cannot detect AI. The same frame-counters are now pausing Prada’s hand-drawn film, unsure whether a stretched frame is a machine’s error or an animator’s old trick.
What they can detect is carelessness. A misspelt dog tag was approved by a person, whoever or whatever drew it. “AI” has become the public’s word for “you didn’t try”. In “AI slop”, the insult is the second word.
Think about what people are doing in these weeks. Choosing presents. Planning meals. Untangling lights. It is the time of year they put the most care into everything. Into that walks an advertiser, uninvited.
The least we can do is arrive with a gift. That is what those trucks were, and what Australians in the heat were responding to: one of the first gifts of the season.
A Christmas ad that makes no attempt at wonder or joy is the envelope of cash. The value may be the same. The thought is missing.
Whether a hand or a machine made it has nothing to do with that. A dozen brands reaching for stop-motion in the same fortnight are not a dozen acts of care, and some of them are a technique standing in for an idea. Equally, a film made with AI can be thoughtful and beautiful. It is the thought in the ad that people feel.
I am an optimist about this, and the reason is the audience. Christmas is one of the few times of year people look forward to advertising. They wait for it. They ask whether this year’s is as good as last year’s. The door we push at for eleven months is left open.
Nobody leaves a door open hoping for a voucher. They leave it open hoping for a little magic. The first brand to walk through it with these new tools, and bring something nobody has seen before, will get the applause Coca-Cola got in 1993.
At Christmas the audience does something it does at no other time of year. It hopes the ad will be good.
Which ad are you still wishing for this year?
Brandflow is written by Justin Billingsley, who has spent his career on all three sides of the industry’s table: senior client, global agency leader, technology founder. If this felt more like a gift than an interruption, subscribe here. Brandflow lands by email every Monday and Thursday.
