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Coca-Cola Bets on AI to Reinvent Holidays Are Coming for 2025
Coca-Cola's 2025 Holidays Are Coming campaign is an AI-generated remake of the brand's 1995 Christmas classic, produced by San Francisco studios Secret Level and Silverside AI and released on November 3, 2025, initially for the United States market before planned distribution across approximately 140 countries, according to reporting by NBC Chicago and Marketing Interactive.
The campaign consists of two commercials scheduled to run across the 2025 holiday period. Both films reimagine the brand's iconic illuminated trucks — arguably the most recognisable visual property in Christmas advertising — through the lens of generative AI, preserving the nostalgic score and the emotional language of the original while rebuilding every frame with next-generation production tooling. Coca-Cola describes the 2025 edition as pushing the boundaries of cinematic storytelling, technical precision, and production quality. The digital campaign marks the second consecutive year the brand has pursued an AI-led version of Holidays Are Coming, following the first-ever AI-generated iteration released in 2024, and signals a deliberate, sustained creative strategy rather than a one-off experiment.
In the United States, the campaign carries particular weight. The domestic audience is the most culturally saturated with the original 1995 imagery, making the AI remake a direct test of whether generative technology can honour inherited emotional resonance. Coca-Cola produced one version exclusively for the US market, underlining that geographic specificity — not just global scale — is a core objective of the AI-assisted workflow. The brand's Global VP and Head of Generative AI, Pratik Thakar, has described the platform as enabling a transformational leap into the future of creativity and technology, framing the production not merely as advertising but as a statement about where cinematic storytelling is heading.
Coca-Cola treats Holidays Are Coming as a cultural asset, not merely an advertisement. The original 1995 campaign, created under W.B. Doner and built around three real 40-foot trucks each carrying approximately 30,000 bulbs, according to sources including Stash Media and Canny Creative, established a visual shorthand for Christmas that the brand has maintained for three decades. The 2025 AI-generated digital campaign is therefore less a creative reinvention than a production reinvention — the emotional architecture stays intact while the manufacturing process is rebuilt from the ground up.
The strategic rationale is efficiency without sacrifice of scale. As reported by NBC Chicago and The Decoder, the AI-led production took approximately one month to complete — a compression of timelines that would be unachievable through conventional live-action production. Five AI specialists handled the prompting, producing, and refining of more than 70,000 generated video clips, according to NBC Chicago and Marketing Interactive. That ratio of output to headcount represents a structural shift in how large-brand seasonal content can be produced and versioned across geographies. Coca-Cola has stated that AI tools allow teams to quickly produce multiple versions of a film for different audiences or geographies, giving creators unprecedented freedom and control.
The competitive context matters. PepsiCo, Coca-Cola's primary rival in the carbonated soft drinks category, has not committed to an equivalent AI-first seasonal franchise, leaving Coca-Cola to define the emerging convention. The global carbonated soft drinks market is substantial — Fortune Business Insights places the global figure at approximately 285 billion US dollars in 2025 with a compound annual growth rate of around 3.5 percent through 2033 — and holiday advertising drives a disproportionate share of brand salience during the category's peak gifting period. Coca-Cola's decision to anchor its 2025 Christmas ad strategy in AI production positions it as the category's most visible experimenter in generative creative, with the US market serving as the primary proving ground. The campaign also operates within the brand's broader Real Magic platform, launched globally in 2021, which emphasises human connection and shared experience as the brand's emotional territory, according to Brandvelle and Canny Creative.
Secret Level and Silverside AI anchor the production of the 2025 Holidays Are Coming AI-generated campaign. Both studios are based in San Francisco, and their involvement reflects Coca-Cola's deliberate choice to work with specialists in generative video rather than adapting conventional production houses to new tooling. Silverside is credited as an additional production partner alongside Silverside AI, suggesting a division of labour between the two entities across different aspects of the workflow.
Pratik Thakar, Global Vice President and Head of Generative AI at The Coca-Cola Company, has articulated the creative methodology in precise terms. Speaking in March 2025 and cited by Marketing Dive, Thakar described GenAI tools as enabling control of every cinematic detail — from camera angles to physics-driven realism — through intuitive visual annotations that mimic a director's workflow. That framing is significant: the production process is described in the language of direction and craft rather than automation, positioning the five AI specialists involved not as operators but as a creative team exercising directorial judgment at scale.
The sheer volume of material generated — more than 70,000 video clips, as reported by NBC Chicago and Marketing Interactive — reflects both the ambition and the iterative nature of AI-assisted production. Unlike live-action shoots, where footage volume is constrained by physical time and cost, generative workflows produce abundance by default; the craft lies in selection, refinement, and narrative coherence rather than capture. Islam ElDessouky, Global Vice President of Creative Strategy and Content at The Coca-Cola Company, is credited alongside Thakar as a key internal voice shaping the campaign's creative direction. The result is a film designed to be cinematically seamless — consistent characters, physics-accurate movement, and a visual register close enough to the original 1995 trucks to trigger recognition while being unmistakably constructed rather than photographed. That tension between the familiar and the artificial is, by design, the central creative statement of the 2025 digital campaign.
No single verified commercial performance metric — such as sales lift or media reach by market — is publicly available for the 2025 Holidays Are Coming AI-generated campaign at the time of writing. What is documented is the audience reception data, which is substantive and mixed. The campaign archive recorded 58,412 views, 352 likes, and 227 comments, and the qualitative tenor of the response was sharply divided.
CARMA media-intelligence data, as cited by multiple outlets including Forbes and Euronews, showed that after the November 3, 2025 launch, positive conversations stood at 10.2 percent against 32 percent negative — a deterioration from the pre-launch window, which registered 23.8 percent positive and 31.4 percent negative. Dominant negative sentiment terms recorded in the archive included descriptors such as soulless, lifeless, creepy, and cheap. Marketing Week, reporting on November 3, 2025, framed the launch with neutral editorial sentiment, contextualising it as a continuation of the brand's generative AI strategy rather than a departure.
The structural effectiveness of the campaign is easier to defend than its reception. By producing two versioned films — including one created exclusively for the United States — in approximately one month with five specialists and over 70,000 generated clips, Coca-Cola demonstrated that AI-assisted production can deliver seasonal, geographically tailored content at a speed and cost profile that conventional production cannot match. Whether audiences reward that efficiency with affection is a separate question, and the 2025 data suggests the answer, at least in this cycle, skews toward scepticism. Clapboard scores this campaign 73 out of 100, recognising its technical ambition and production innovation while reflecting the measurable gap between creative intent and audience warmth.
Coca-Cola's 2025 Holidays Are Coming campaign is an AI-generated remake of its 1995 Christmas classic. Produced by Secret Level and Silverside AI in San Francisco, it consists of two commercials released on November 3, 2025, including one version made exclusively for the United States market, with planned distribution across approximately 140 countries.
Secret Level and Silverside AI, both based in San Francisco, produced the 2025 Holidays Are Coming AI-generated films. Silverside is credited as an additional production partner. Internally, Pratik Thakar, Global VP and Head of Generative AI, and Islam ElDessouky, Global VP of Creative Strategy and Content, led the brand side of the campaign.
Five AI specialists used generative tools to prompt, produce, and refine more than 70,000 video clips for the campaign. Pratik Thakar described the process as enabling directorial control over every cinematic detail — from camera angles to physics-driven realism. The entire AI-led production was completed in approximately one month, according to NBC Chicago.
Audience reaction was largely negative. CARMA media-intelligence data, cited by Forbes and Euronews, showed 32 percent negative conversations after launch against 10.2 percent positive. Recorded sentiment terms included soulless, lifeless, and creepy. The campaign archive documented 58,412 views, 352 likes, and 227 comments, reflecting a significant gap between brand intent and audience warmth.
The 1995 original was created under W.B. Doner using three real 40-foot trucks carrying approximately 30,000 bulbs each, according to Stash Media and Canny Creative. The 2025 AI-generated version retains the original nostalgic score and the illuminated truck imagery while rebuilding every frame through generative production, preserving emotional heritage inside an entirely new technical framework.
Clapboard scores the 2025 Coca-Cola Holidays Are Coming AI-generated campaign 73 out of 100. The score recognises the campaign's genuine technical ambition — over 70,000 generated clips, a one-month production cycle, and geographic versioning — while reflecting the documented gap between its production innovation and the measurable negative sentiment recorded among audiences in the United States.
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