Marketing, Rewritten: Life After the First AI Holiday Campaigns

When P.J. Pereira got the call from Coca-Cola, he thought he was making a small YouTube video for the holidays. The brief was modest: an experiment, a small part of a larger campaign. He finished a one-minute-and-seven-second film and moved on. Then Coca-Cola called back. They had tested it. It scored better than anything else in the campaign. Could he cut a 60-second and a 30-second version? They wanted to run it as the global holiday spot. Pereira, who had spent decades building one of the most awarded creative agencies in advertising, suddenly found himself with the most consequential brief of his career—and the most fun he had had in twenty years.

The Accidental Campaign and the Ambition Trap

Pereira co-founded Silverside AI as a lab within his agency Pereira & O'Dell, then spun it out as a separate company to avoid being constrained by existing processes. They had no clients and were running small experiments when Coca-Cola approached them. The company's institutional empathy was crucial: they protected the team from the weight of what they were building. "They knew that that was a possibility," Pereira says, "but they protected us from that weight and responsibility." If the initial brief had been "create a global campaign for Coca-Cola's holiday advertising," he admits he might have frozen.