Coca-Cola and Christmas 2025: Santa Is Gone, Neural Networks Remain

🎄 For Coca-Cola, Christmas is not just a holiday. It’s a sacred marketing season, with its own liturgy of jingles, trucks, and the color red.
After all, it was Coca-Cola that, nearly a century ago in the 1930s, “dressed” Santa Claus in a red suit — matching its logo — and turned him into the main advertising icon of the 20th century.
Since then, the brand has had no right to make mistakes: half the planet waits for its Christmas commercial as part of the December ritual — along with the tree and the first snow.

And now, in 2025, Coca-Cola has once again decided to rewrite the rules.
The new holiday commercial “Holidays Are Coming” was created entirely with the help of artificial intelligence.
No actors. No film crew. No human directors.
Only algorithms — and animals.

AI instead of a film set
Only five people worked on the project together with AI studios Silverside and Secret Level.
The entire “shooting” took just 30 days instead of the usual 12 months.
Generative models produced over 70,000 video fragments, which were then assembled into the final ad.

A year ago, Coca-Cola already experimented with AI — and faced a wave of criticism: viewers complained about “plastic people” and “creepy smiles.”
But the brand didn’t back down.

As Pratik Thakar, Coca-Cola’s VP of Global Marketing, said: “The genie is out of the bottle. Artificial intelligence is now at the heart of the company’s marketing transformation.”

And he’s right: with the current level of generative video, this may be the last Christmas when anyone even notices that the ad was made by AI.
Next year — no one will care.

What it means

For business:

• Production time cut from 12 months to 30 days.
• Team — 5 people instead of hundreds.
• Campaign costs and timelines reduced by 10–12 times.

Coca-Cola has set a new pace for global branding.
Now a seasonal campaign can be created faster, cheaper — and just as emotionally powerful

For investors:

The AI revolution in marketing means massive cuts to creative budgets.

Advertising agencies, production houses, and post-production studios are under threat.

FMCG brand profitability may actually rise — thanks to massive savings.

For people:

The art of advertising is losing its human touch.

Generative ads are becoming so realistic that the line between “real” and “AI-made” disappears.
And with it, we lose that same soulful imperfection that once made frames feel alive.

Impact on the industry

Advertising sector — anxiety level 9/10.
If five people can produce Coca-Cola’s Christmas campaign in a month, thousands of agencies worldwide become redundant.
What to do: shift toward concepts, strategy, and storytelling — not just “pretty visuals.”

Artists and production studios — risk level 8/10.
AI generation already replaces months of shooting.
What to do: master the tools, become “prompt directors” and creative engineers. Otherwise, you’ll be replaced by those who can speak the machine’s language.

🎬 Conclusion:
Once again, Coca-Cola leads the experiment that will set standards for years ahead.
Once, they gave the world Santa.
Now — the Christmas AI.
And if Santa once symbolized human warmth, his digital successor now stands for a new era — the era of cold, flawless marketing.