Coca-Cola has released its 2025 holiday ad and, once again, it’s made entirely with GenAI. And just like last year, the internet wasted no time picking it apart. The critiques are loud: inconsistent lighting, odd transitions, incoherent scenes, trucks with changing wheel counts, a moment where vehicles seem to drive straight into a crowd, and a sloth that looks like it escaped from a Casting Director’s nightmare.
But in all the uproar, we’re missing something important: this year’s ad is significantly better than 2024’s.
The consistency has improved. The realism has improved. The overall quality has made a major leap forward. That matters because it proves something bigger: GenAI is now capable of producing flagship, global creative assets.
Coca-Cola is showing the industry what’s possible, two years in a row.
So what does this mean for brands?
We’ve entered a new creative era where you can produce large-scale commercial content with GenAI at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional production. But there’s a catch: you need the right workflow.
The errors in Coca-Cola’s spot are not a GenAI problem, they’re a workflow problem. To avoid issues like incoherence, mismatched details, and visual inconsistency, you need a structured system that brings together:
