Agency Interrupted: Has AI Killed Christmas?

Everyone knows Coca-Cola used AI to make their iconic holiday ads. Artists cried foul. LinkedIn warriors lost their minds. They made a cringey fake behind-the-scenes video but the trucks still look weird.

It's still pissing everyone off. Well, everyone in the ad industry at least. But what if that means it’s working?

Did they just drown the spirit of Christmas in AI-generated eggnog? Or did they just optimise for everything that actually matters?

Look, I'm not an AI skeptic. I’m using the tool hourly at this point. AI is massively transformative. It just tabulated my expenses in three seconds. We can use it to prototype faster, test more ideas, create localised versions at scale and free creatives from soul-crushing busywork.

AI isn't our enemy —it's a tool.

Coke just proved you can make mediocre creative, deploy it at scale and still win by the numbers. And if that becomes the playbook, we're all doomed right?

It’s not just Coca-Cola…

McDonald's Netherlands just pulled their AI Christmas ad after a three-day backlash. The 45-second nightmare was, as most noted, “more cynical about Christmas than the Grinch”. The agency claimed they "hardly slept" making it. The result: a fever dream that looked like it had never experienced the joy of Dominic The Italian Christmas Donkey.

New Brunswick liquor stores had their AI holiday “ad” pulled by a government minister after the local creative community erupted. The ad featured gibberish bottle labels and nonsensical lighting. A filmmaker who worked on last year's real ad said: "It's something to lose a contract to somebody that's creating better stuff than you are. But it's something else to lose a contract to generative AI."

Brands are making ads that feel manufactured, empty and corporate but perform adequately. Christmas imagined by algorithms that have read about it but never felt it. Coke's 2025 version is more polished—better animals, fewer glitches, more expressive pandas.

But "less bad" isn't "good", it's toasted bread on a turd sandwich.

The problem isn't that these brands used AI. It's that they used AI badly and it still worked. Well, maybe not the low bar of N.B. Liquor —hey found the “too much AI” bar and then leaped over it.

In each case the brands used AI to efficiently recreate what already existed. To save time and money on tried-and-true formulas. That's cost-cutting through 70,000 prompts, not innovation.

And the fact that it performed means every other brand is thinking: "Why pay for craft when AI mediocrity hits the same numbers?"

We don’t want "good enough" to become the standard simply because AI makes it so damn efficient.

Clients will look at Coke's numbers and say "sure, do that." Agencies will choose fast work over great work as procurement celebrates in the bowels of hold-cos everywhere.

AI should elevate creative capabilities, not just give us permission to be lazy

Responding to the backlash from the AI Christmas ad, Pratik Thakar, Coca-Cola’s head of generative AI said, "The genie is out of the bottle, and you're not going to put it back in."

That is true, but the genie should be making our wishes better, not just faster.
Coke could have used AI to explore wild new creative directions. To test 50 concepts and find something genuinely fresh. To push boundaries.

Instead they simply generated cheaper, faster versions of the same old thing. A Ferrari used for grocery runs.

So here's what keeps me up at night: What if efficiency wins?

What if AI-generated holiday ads become normal? What if metrics become the only measure? What if craft becomes an expensive luxury only some brands can't justify? Then we'll live in a world where everything performs adequately and nothing feels special. Where every ad hits its KPIs and none of them matter.

AI isn't going away. But we don’t have to be Slim Pickens riding the bomb like a cowboy hat wearing yahoo in 1964’s Dr. Strangelove.

AI should be the tool that lets us take bigger creative swings, not safer ones. It should free us to be more human, not less. It should make great work more accessible, not make mediocre work more acceptable.

Coke and McDonald's proved that AI can deliver results or even create a conversation even when the work is uninspired. That's not a win for AI. That's a warning.

Because if brands learn that mediocre AI work performs just as well as great human work, why would they ever pay for great again?

The agencies that survive this will be the ones who use AI to raise the bar, not just lower the cost. Who uses it to do impossible things, or more things, not just to do older things faster.

These brands had the resources, the technology and the opportunity to show us what AI-powered creativity could be.

Instead, they showed us what happens when you optimise for metrics instead of magic.

When you choose efficiency over community. When you mistake speed for progress.