For a few weeks last November, no villain loomed larger over Madison Avenue and the social media that polices it than Coca-Cola.
The company’s “The Holidays Are Coming” spot, an homage to a classic 1995 ad, featured the original’s rhythmic anthem as trucks drove through various snowy landscapes. Only now the ad was filled with AI-generated objects, animals and people — a fact that did not go over well with creatives and many others on the Internet. “Coca-Cola is red because it’s made from the blood of out-of-work artists,” decried Hollywood writer Alex Hirsch, one of many such negative comments noting both the spot’s labor ethics and its aesthetics. (Despite or because of the backlash, the ad racked up billions of impressions.)
