Three AI studios remade one Coca-Cola ad, three ways

The shot

In November 2024, Coca-Cola released three television commercials remaking its 1995 'Holidays Are Coming' truck advert using generative video, each produced by a separate outside studio. According to Ad Age's reporting, published 14 November 2024, the three studios were Secret Level, Silverside AI, and The Wild Card, and one of the spots premiered early at Ad Age's own Emerging Tech Summit that week. Coca-Cola's own statement describes a parallel, consumer-facing element: an AI-generated holiday card platform, 'Create Real Magic,' credited to Bain & Company and the WPP agency network including Ogilvy and Essence Mediacom.

What the documents show

Ad Age's report quotes Coca-Cola's VP and global head of generative AI, Pratik Thakar, naming the specific AI models used across the campaign, Leonardo, Luma, and Runway, with the Kling model becoming 'integral' to Secret Level's spot after it was released mid-production, per Secret Level founder Jason Zada. This is the vendor's own account of its production process, corroborated by a named studio founder speaking on the record, closer to verified production use than a promotional claim, since specific companies and models are named against a specific released ad. A week later, Ad Age's 22 November follow-up records the UK Telegraph's headline 'Coca-Cola kills off Santa' and Thakar's on-the-record reply that criticism reflected a misconception that 'we press a button and a film comes out.'

The workflow

Thakar told Ad Age that Secret Level's spot used real actors, filmed for likeness reference with their permission, and a soundtrack recorded three separate times by real musicians for the three versions, not AI-generated audio. Zada described the practical benefit as speed rather than cost: producing the ad from contributors' homes worldwide instead of an on-location shoot in a cold climate, cutting production time Thakar estimated at 'five times' faster than a traditional shoot, while still requiring, in his words, real visual-effects work and human decisions at 'the decision-making table.'

What the tool does not change

Neither Ad Age report nor Coca-Cola's own statement describes any part of the campaign as unsupervised generation: casting, likeness consent, composition choices, and the final approved cut all remain, by the companies' own account, human decisions layered onto AI-generated footage. The public reaction Ad Age documents is aimed at the visual result, not at a claim that no humans were involved; Thakar's own framing distinguishes 'polarized reactions' from any concession that the process lacked oversight.

• Which specific studios and models does a company credit, and does that match what critics assumed happened?
• Were performers' likenesses used with documented consent, as Ad Age reports for this campaign?
• Does public criticism of an ad's look imply anything about how much human review actually went into it?

The two Ad Age accounts, filed a week apart, show a heavily credited, human-supervised AI production process meeting a public reaction focused almost entirely on visual style, a gap this site's evidence framework is built to keep separate.