Santa Meets Silicon: The Story Behind Coca-Cola’s AI Campaign

In 1931, Coca-Cola essentially invented the modern visual of Santa Claus for a holiday ad. In 2024, the company took that same iconic holiday imagery and remade it using generative AI. The result was an ad that scored a 4.59 out of 5 stars on System1’s emotional response scale—the highest possible score any ad can receive, whether AI-generated or not. But the story behind that ad is less about the technology and more about how a 140-year-old brand decides what to protect, what to stretch, and how to lead an organization through a moment when the technology itself is changing every 30 days.

The brief was about creative quality, not technology

Coca-Cola’s EVP and CMO, Manolo Arroyo, says the holiday brief was simple: generate the magic of the season year after year. AI was never the starting point. The insight was that Coca-Cola sells emotions, not a liquid, and that generative AI offered flexibility and adaptability to reinterpret the holiday caravan in ways traditional production could not. The technology was treated as a creative partner, not the author of the work. Arroyo emphasizes that the company never compromised on two things: the quality of the creative and the centrality of the human storyteller. Every frame of the final ad involved complex cycles of prompting, manual revisions, scene composition, aesthetic decision-making, and music synchronization driven by peo