The Coca-Cola holiday truck is featured, but thanks to AI, some viewers may be doing a double take.
The soda giant unveiled three ads this week as part of its 2025 holiday campaign. One of the ads (an AI-generated remake of the iconic 1995 “Holidays Are Coming” spot) has some glitchy inconsistencies.
If you look closely, you’ll see that the famous Coca-Cola truck appears to change shape as it drives through the festive village. In each scene, the truck appears to have more or less wheels.
Dino Burbidge, an independent innovation specialist, has created this handy graphic to help you understand.
Coca-Cola’s holiday truck looked a little different in each scene. dino burbidge
Other viewers also noticed other apparent inconsistencies, including an alarming moment at the 50-second mark when the truck appeared to be on a collision course with a large crowd of onlookers.
“I really miss the internet before AI,” reads a comment below the YouTube video.
Coca-Cola’s wobbly Christmas truck highlights one of the biggest flaws in the generative video model. This technique often struggles to maintain character and object consistency across multiple shots. Many systems generate video frame by frame without maintaining a strong memory of previous scenes, resulting in temporal drift. However, some newer models claim to have solved this problem.
Lack of continuity is often one of the biggest telltale signs that a video isn’t real.
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Marketers and the broader advertising industry have rapidly adopted AI as a way to speed up production time and reduce costs. However, the introduction of this technology in the industry has also raised concerns about job losses and a decline in the overall quality of advertising. Recent research shows that some consumers are averse to AI-generated ads, especially those featuring human faces.
Coca-Cola did not respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.
“There’s going to be some people who will criticize it. You can’t make everyone 100 percent happy,” Pratik Thakar, Coca-Cola’s global vice president and head of generative AI, said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter this week. “But if the majority of consumers view it positively, it’s worth moving forward.”
In a behind-the-scenes video posted to Coca-Cola’s YouTube channel on Monday, the company said just five AI experts refined 70,000 video clips to create the ad in 30 days using tools such as OpenAI’s Sora, Google’s Veo 3, and Luma AI. According to the video, some adjustments were made in post-production.
Silverside AI, an AI innovation lab backed by advertising agency Pereira Odell, collaborated with Coca-Cola to create the 2025 “Holidays Are Coming” spot.
“Coca-Cola became a pioneer in this field because once they recognized AI as the future, they stopped debating whether it was perfect or not and instead focused on how to use it in the best and most creative way possible,” PJ Pereira, co-founder of Pereira O’Dell & Silverside AI, told Business Insider in a statement.
“With the world evolving so rapidly, we need brands with leadership like Coca-Cola to move technology and craft forward, rather than waiting until we’re 100% ready,” Pereira said. He added that the ad “has already been tested incredibly well.”
Never mind the critics. Is advertising doing its job?
System1, which rates ads on a scale of 1 to 5.9 stars for their potential to drive long-term brand growth, gave the 2025 “Holidays are Coming” ad its highest score of 5.9. The research firm asked a panel of consumers from several countries to indicate how they felt about the ads they saw, using a list of emotions ranging from contempt and disgust to happiness and surprise.
“Generative AI played a role behind the scenes, but what really shines through is Coca-Cola’s commitment to emotional storytelling and creative consistency,” said Vanessa Chin, senior vice president of marketing at System1. “This is a powerful reminder that when brands understand their audience and respect what works, the results will speak for themselves.”
DAIVID, another creative testing platform that measures audience sentiment, said “The Holidays Are Coming” ads were slightly less likely to generate positive emotions (2.1%) and more likely to evoke distrust (2%) compared to industry standards. However, it did generate higher than average attention and brand recall scores, and a DAIVID spokesperson said this was likely due to the Coca-Cola ad being highly distinctive.
Coca-Cola’s AI-generated 2024 holiday campaign also drew polarized reactions. One of the videos – another take on a classic truck ad – was widely criticized online as an AI misstep, with critics picking on details such as wheels sliding across the floor instead of spinning and a creepy-looking AI “human” smiling eerily.
In an interview with Ad Age last year, Takhar said that when it comes to advertising in 2024, consumers won’t be looking at AI campaigns in the same way as creative directors. “Consumers didn’t care whether it was AI or non-AI,” Takhar said.
Burbidge, the innovation expert who posted online about defective wheels on Coca-Cola’s AI trucks, said in an interview with Business Insider that the production problems in Coca-Cola’s campaign were intolerable and that the company risked damaging its brand.
“Is this a slippery slope where traditionally trusted media and productions are devalued because of ‘consumer apathy’?” Burbidge said. “Craft, creativity and quality should be true. If we let it go, who will fight for it?”
