Coca-Cola just dropped the 2025 edition of their beloved “Holidays Are Coming” ad – the one that taught an entire generation to finally start thinking about Christmas. Last year, the cars were slipping on ice and the passengers looked like melted wax. This year, the wheels turn alright but the passengers are all furry critters – polar bears, sloths, squirrels and even seals.
They used Silverside AI and Secret Level to feed countless prompts into various AI video engines that generated 70,000 clips, which were then sorted through by 5 engineers, frame by frame. It’s loads better than last year, but every single one of the animals looks like its been cut out of paper and dragged along the floor – a sloth gives the bare minimum of a wave and its paw bends back all wrong. Then just as you’re about to think this is all a bit barmy, Santa turns up. He’s a straight lift from Haddon Sundblom’s 1931 artwork and is the only human face we see the whole time.
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No word yet on how much they spent, but Coke say its a fair bit less than what they splurged on the last version which included real location filming, union crews and actual polar bears borrowed from the zoo. A whole 100 people were involved, but now most of them just tap away on keyboards instead of wrestling with cables. Manolo Arroyo, their head honcho for marketing worldwide said that it used to take a whole year to light up the cars just right.
They’ve made not one, but two versions – America gets the animal kingdom while the rest of the world gets a slightly different take with a bit more fireworks over the final billboard. Both fade to the same spot though – a bottle opens with a hiss, the screen goes red and the jingle comes on – just like it always does. I’ll be amazed if next year they don’t have dolphins in elf hats and giraffes done up in tinsel. The tools just keep getting better and before you know it they’ll have a skeleton lurking beneath all that fur. For now, they’re just making do with training data and a bit of luck and managing to transport a load of nostalgia that nobody actually asked for.
