Coca-Cola's AI Holiday Ad Used 70,000 Video Clips

0:28Alright, welcome back to Den Noise. but they cut down the Nicole Kidman spot. The Nicole Kidman Movies Are Magic is now, I don't even know, it's like 10 seconds. I think it was maybe, what, 30 seconds before, but it was like, it played and it was this cut down version. I was like, what happened? However, it was on long enough for people - We could have a whole episode about what happened. It was on long enough for people in the theater to still cheer and clap because AMC Century City is a quality theater with a quality audience, as we've covered before. Some would say the best kind of audience.

1:02Hollywood Insiders. Some of the audience did walk out of this movie, though. So maybe not all of them are the best audience. I'm guessing just the rights to use that probably expired. No, I think I'm guessing it's because they wanted to squeeze more ads or more trailers in, and they wanted to save time. The 20 seconds. Oh, so it's a purely economic reason. Also, they did not cut down the Coca-Cola ad that everyone sort of loves to hate, that sort of riffs on The Fast and the Furious and other movies that I can't remember right now, which plays immediately before. Cinema going, cinema making as a religion is kind of getting hit by economics.

1:39Yeah, but I mean, Nicole Kidman, you can't touch her. That's sacrosanct. Oh boy. All right, speaking to Coca-Cola, there is another Coca-Cola ad that is causing some more online controversy, as usual. It is another AI Coca-Cola ad for the holidays. This is the third year, I believe, that they've used AI in their holiday ads. So yeah, let's run. I think there are two different versions because every time people link to stuff, and when I checked out Coca-Cola's YouTube channel, there are two different versions, but they're both made, I believe, by Secret Studio, Jason Zada's company. Yeah, I actually have heard a lot about it over the last week.

2:16As you know, you and I are both in New York, and I was deep in the agency world over there, and everybody was talking about this commercial. so I saw bits and pieces of it, but I would love to do a live reaction with you right now. Yeah, let's play it. And I'm sorry, it was Secret Level, Jason Sada's company, not Secret Studio. Secret Level. Here, let's play the Holidays Are Coming fantastical version.

2:45So, animals reacting to Coca-Cola trucks driving.

2:53I think the details of the animals look really good.

3:02Yeah, it has a very distinct Coke style to it. Yeah, I mean, it looks like a CG animation. The quality has definitely leveled up a lot. Yeah. You could see the AI sheen in some of the shots. Yeah. Some of them look really sharp. That wide was a little. The hubcaps had a Coca-Cola detail. That's nice. Ooh, Santa's super plasticky, man. But I feel like that's... To me, that shot is the shot that gives us the reason of why you would go AI. Because everything else is like, okay, why not just do it CG? This shot is the reason I think the AI makes sense because this is a throwback to the classic 1930s Norman Rockwell.

3:45Yeah, hand-illustrated. Yeah, and they brought him to life, which is the big thing that AI's cool at. I think this was probably the easiest shot out of all the other shots. It's just an image to video on a very basic motion. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure that had composite a lot of the stuff or not had been added a lot of the stuff to make the frame and then image to video. Yeah. You want to see the other spot? Yeah. I mean, before we get to that, the one thing that is notoriously difficult with AI, you and I both know this, is text and specifically very stylized cursive text that the Coca-Cola logo is.

4:19Yeah. even there i would say that it's uh it's a little too thin so maybe like the aspect ratio seems too tall here like like the perspective they didn't get it right like the dimension not the dimension the um like it's a little distorted the aspect ratio is what you're saying yeah right like the the c should actually be touching his finger on the left side of the frame and the a should be touching his thumb because the aspect ratio just has to be a little bit wider. Yeah, you can go to an actual Coca-Cola logo. And if you look at those two side by side, yeah, so the bottle one seems a little bit thin.

4:58I know it's a super small detail, but people like Coke actually obsess over these details. So you can pause on any frame where the Coca-Cola logo is shown. That feels like it was just plastered on, right? Like after the fact.

5:16The color temperature of the font doesn't match the color temperature of the bulbs or anything else. So that feels after the fact there. Well, okay. I mean, I'm thinking first off, Coca-Cola signed off on this. So whatever minor discrepancies with the logo, I guess they're cool with. CG wouldn't get that level of error, though. No, you'd have the control. But I mean, that's still the debate. I mean, not the debate that's just still the battle with AI of just like the battle of speed versus control. I mean, I'm thinking for something that is so, has so many thin lines and is a pretty detailed logo, it held up really well for AI, even given the current state of AI.

5:57And go ahead. Yeah. I'm curious on what the AI workflow was at the secret level, because I know for a fact, if you just throw the coca-cola logo into a video generation model it's going to come it's going to work it chopped up yeah well that's why so i mean there is a behind it so yeah let's talk about that because they have a couple shots about with the logo and that gives a hint of the workflow and um i was just joking while the video was playing but there was a shot of a rabbit looking at the truck driving by and that rabbit looked exactly like peter rabbit the latest version of peter rabbit movie with a beanie and the the ears kind of pulled back and i'm wondering if it's supposed to be peter rabbit and they had the ip license for that or it was just video models generating stuff that they trained on i mean i did see some other comments online have some of the other characters looked like some characters from zootopia but uh if you look at the behind the scenes video i mean from what they're saying everything was started from like character sketches and different like character sheets turned into first frames turned into video from the behind the scenes video wasn't like oh let's just get a shot of the rabbit of like a shot of the rabbit generated and then it happens to look like peter cottontail cottontail i don't know that's right was that oh wait what were you saying it's pure content right peter rabbit peter rabbit is the cartoon and the ip yeah okay okay here's the behind the scenes video give an ai Tag company, BTS, task.

7:35Yeah, I mean, those shots are sharp, man. Like, they use some good upsellers.

7:48Yeah, that's obviously composited. Yeah, but that was for the behind-the-scenes thing. Yeah. I mean... Let me jump ahead. It works. It really works. Oh, go back to that wipe? Yeah. What are they wiping?

8:07That's Photoshop. Okay, it looks like I imaged the video. So look, it has these things of some 3D models. I'm trying to wonder where the 3D models come into play. Yeah, like that bottle's way too small unless it's the mini 250-milliliter bottle. They've got this sort of depth extraction thing. I'm trying to recognize what software this is. And then here, this is a magnificent upscaler. Nice. But here, look, they have character sheets, sketches. They're saying everything started from sketches, started from artists drawing the sketches. Sure, I could believe that. Turning into the animation, a lot of in-painting in the shots to tweak the first frames.

8:51This is a complex challenge. Here, and people are kind of losing their mind over this. So look, they're compositing the logos. It still looks like they're doing the logos on the image, but they're compositing the logos into the image. And that's VO3. That's what I would do. Yeah, I wouldn't even try to generate the logos. I would just add it on after the fact, which is exactly what I did. Well, no, I'm impressed that they're adding the logos onto the image and then running image to video in VO3 and that it is holding up. Oh, really? See, look, I mean, that output was VO3. There's that rabbit character.

9:24Yeah. I guess it's not Peter Rabbit. This is VO3 and that output and the logo looks pretty good. I mean, look, we just did a commercial where most of the shots were AI generated and it involved like children book covers. And if the text is really big, it would kind of hold up, you know, in VO3. but anything smaller like author names and stuff just turned garbled but for the entire book covers we would just recomposite the actual image on top of the final video which i'm wondering if you do that with some of the logos you it's got look i mean the text has gotten better but it's still not great with uh ai uh yeah so there's your rabbit character i mean yeah it looks like a lot of very detailed i mean it's kind of interesting to me because they're doing all this like they're showing shots of like very detailed like modifications on the frames it's it's this stuff's gonna get shrunk to hd or lower in the video and i'm just wondering like and then output at 720 maybe 1080 obviously you're gonna uprise it i'm just wondering does all of this detail painting really matter because it's gonna get it's gonna get compressed and re spit out as a video that is way low fidelity yeah i i think it absolutely matters because there's just such a high number of furry creatures in there and fur is notoriously difficult in CG as well as in AI.

10:41You're talking about aliasing and moraying and so yeah, I think you have to hand paint as much as you need to do. Yeah, interesting. I think, I mean the other thing that works with the fur and with these shots and from my experience with AI. Those were Zootopia characters for sure. So if you go to the shot after this, right there. The koalas. I guess they would be koalas Yeah. Yeah. That looks just like the Zootopia koalas. The thing that helps with the fur is they're all close-ups or medium shots. Yeah. You know, the closer you get with the detail, the better the AI is and the more singular. I mean, I'm impressed.

11:17They even have an anamorphic bokeh on that koala shot. I'm impressed with this shot. It's not consistent with the rest of the shots because the rest of the shots seem spherical. I'm impressed with this shot because it's a pretty wide shot with a lot of leaf, plant, palm tree details. A lot of detail there. And the details hold up. Oh, look at that. Yeah. Here you could see a bit in this shot of, I don't even know what this kind of looks like Paris, kind of looks like some canal shot. Yeah, I mean, look, it sounds like I'm being super picky here, but honestly, this is as clunky and low quality as it'll ever get.

11:52And it'll only get better from here. So if you imagine commercials of the future, like this is the prototype that they're going to build on. and I think you're just going to see less and less resources, less and less touch-ups, and faster and faster outputs, honestly. Right. I mean, the flip of this is like, okay, cool, if we can make a high-quality ad with fewer people, less time, lower budget, then why is it just making one ad? It's like now you have the chance to make multiple variations and multiple holiday ads that kind of live in this universe. Maybe that's why they made two, I mean, for the same budget.

12:25I'm just guessing. I don't know what the full budget was. But, you know, I think that's what is the promise of this, of being able to do this kind of stuff, you know, faster and cheaper. I love that thought. My thought, in addition to that, is Disney looking at this for Zootopia 3? I mean, I think every animation studio is looking at this as some form in their pipeline. We talked about this before. You know, I mean, I think people get this misconception of just like, yeah, I'll just type in a text video and make a Zootopia. and it's like no this is the stuff to help you just save the in-betweener shots or compositing shots or other stuff in between you still see the amount of um work that goes into it yeah and and like the whole look and feel of the coke commercials of the past i mean all of the like the ice and the nighttime driving and the nighttime shots with like a like a dark blue you know indigo night sky with a bunch of stars like all those elements that make a coke commercial what it is retained here very much so.

13:28It just is so much more complex than I thought it would be for an AI commercial. Like complex in the work that went into making it? As well as the stuff that is in it, like the number of characters, all of the different shots, the different environments. This is a lot, even for a traditional production. My favorite reaction that I've seen online, obviously there was a lot of pushback and just like, AI is stealing jobs or yada yada. But this one, Oh, now it has over 164 ,000 likes. But Matt Lieb, basically Coca-Cola used AI to make their holiday ad. And when people got mad, they created a fake behind-the-scenes video with a screenshot of the Coca-Cola logo being composited onto the frame in Photoshop.

14:11And people say that that's not how this works. As if, I don't know, that's cheating with AI. I still don't fully know what that commentary means. Yeah, I think the mainstream folks, like middle-of-the-road folks who don't mess with AI as much as we do, don't have an idea how easy it is to combine AI workflows with traditional workflows. Like, they complement each other, if you think about it. Yeah, or I don't know, like even that there's some purity of like being an AI-only workflow. And it's like whatever tool gets the job done, it gets you to the end result. in the time and budget that you have.

14:53But yeah, as we've talked about extensively before, there's really no way around getting good detailed outputs with things that you need to honor, like logos and text, without compositing it manually. I'm impressed if they were able to composite it in the frame and get final output at a VO or whatever model. That's impressive. And not have it warp or completely change. Very much so. So look, when we were covering the Tilly Norwood stuff, I think I definitely sided with the public on why I didn't think that that was the right move at the time. This one, I feel like it's pretty spot on and it's timely, it's relevant, and it's using the technology in the right way.

15:39Having said that, there is a comment on X from Vashi Nadamansky, and it's the second link, Joey. So it's got all of the stats on how long this took and how many people it took. You know, something like 50 AI specialists, 46 hours per person, and 100 people involved in the project. Where did they get this data from? Is this accurate? Vashi is a professional editor. Yeah, he was trying to compare what this would have cost if you did this with traditional VFX pipelines. Some of these numbers are accurate, but yeah, I think that's sort of jumping in. Yeah, this is in a good order. Because the thing I wanted to get at, and this number is true, they generated 70 ,000 clips with Comfy for this spot.

16:24That part, I really don't understand how or why you need to generate 70 ,000 actual clips. I mean, maybe first frame images. That's still a lot, but I would understand that more. generating full video clips, 70 ,000 of them. I'm trying to, I would love to know why. Somebody was really happy with the API money. When you get unlimited access to VO3. Yeah, I'm still very confused about that. So it seemed like there was maybe about 20 or so shots in there, right? And if it's like, I don't know, 50 iterations per shot, you're still looking at like a thousand generations tops. Yeah. And there's no way you would need to do 50 iterations.

17:11Yeah. If you're, I mean, the stuff's gotten so good. If you're prompting and giving it some direction, maybe five to 10 generations a shot, but you should get what you want. Um, yeah, that's a very 70 ,000 number. Yeah. I don't know. I'm so confused. I saw this number and it was in one of the, it was in one of the Hollywood reporter, one of the articles and comfy tweeted it out too. I mean, so they, they backed it up. Um, I don't know. I'm very confused about that. Yeah, the Vashi tweet, 70 ,000 is, you know, that's accurate. Yeah, these numbers, it's, they did say that they used 20 people on the crew, which was smaller team than the spot last year.

17:50Yeah, I think he was trying to price out how this would have compared, which he posed the question. He didn't actually, there's no number behind that. So we don't know. We don't know what the budget is for this either. They said it was less than if they did it with traditional methods, but they didn't actually give a number. Yeah, I would imagine it's still significantly cheaper and smaller in team size than traditional computer graphics. I mean, just building those different environments, we saw the palm tree environment, the Chinese panda bear environment, we saw the truck driving through the snow, like I counted maybe as many environments as there are number of shots so let's say 20 environments each one of those would require at least five to ten artists per environment to build these out cg traditionally yeah so you're already looking at you know maybe i don't know a hundred environment artists and then you need character artists animators riggers because there's just so many furry characters you need people to build the fur you need people to get reference from a real performance and then keyframe animate all of that so maybe another 50 or so people just for character animation all together and then you obviously need editors touch up and the traditional stuff right post-production stuff you're looking at a team of about 200 easy for this if not bigger yeah and whatever budget wise take that the 20 people here multiplied by 10, assuming similar day rates or week rates?

19:26Yeah. Budget-wise, it depends on... Four to ten times as much? Easily. It depends on where on the planet you're making this, right? So obviously budgets are going to be a lot smaller if it's in the Philippines or India or someplace like that. But if it's like US-based talent, I mean, you're talking about$5 to$10 million all in with all of the approvals with Coke and the stuff that they don't show, they don't use, and so on. Yeah, the other 69 ,000 video clips. The bottom of the iceberg, yeah. On the other behind-the-scenes spot that I skipped through that I said sounded like a Notebook LM episode, they did show a couple more behind-the-scenes shots and a sheet of different tools.

20:08And it's sort of basically the usual suspects kind of all thrown at it. Comfy, Runway, VO3, Kling, Higgsfield, Kriya, Sora. I'm curious where, what Sora was used and where Sora was used for this. Pacto? I haven't heard that one. Sora was used to turn this into a meme. I'm just kidding. This is like such a cool image to see here. It's like the United Nations of AI models. I don't know what Pacto is, but. I don't know what Pacto is. And yeah, there's one house I had another shot of using the VO3 text markup to steer the shots. and some comfy shots here. Comfy node. Nice. All roads lead to nodes.

20:51Yes. This is where they mention the 70 ,000 clips. Oh, got it. Okay. Yeah, I don't think people saw the other 60 ,000 clips. They were just generated just because. I'm just curious why. Yeah, I don't know. Unless they have some agentic workflow that was just like spit out stuff and we'll just select what we like the best. Yeah, so what are your thoughts? What are your big takeaways? Look, I mean, the fur, the details look great. I think for me, it still feels like it could have leaned more into what AI was good at, which was like bringing 1930s Santa Claus to life. The other thing is there's no speaking characters.

21:28That's still a weakness. We did some on a spot and it's, yeah, it's still a little bit uncanny valley. And so they're still, you know, avoiding anything speaking. It's all voiceover music. Also speaking of music, they had an original jingle, which I'd be curious how that original jingle was created. AI? I doubt it. I bet it was probably commissioned. I don't know. I'd be curious. Yeah, I mean, look, I think that technically the quality, you know, obviously compared to last year is way better. But just overall the spot, I feel like I would want to see some more of what AI is good at. Right now, it feels like this was a good CG spot that they're able to pull off with AI tools.

22:08Yeah, yeah, no, this is... What do you think? I think this is the way things are going. This is exactly the zeitgeist and the status quo as it is in end of 2025. Coke is big enough of a company to obviously put resources in this and the trust in AI to do this. But also Coke is a very, they're very protective over their brand. So for them to kind of lean in and just go all in on this shows the direction in which everybody else is going. If you look at a brand like Apple, how protected they are over what Apple products look like, what Apple commercials look like, they're next. If Coke can pull this off, I think it's all good from everybody down that ladder.

22:52Yeah. Andy, I wanted to call out Coca-Cola. Oh, I didn't even realize this. So Pratik Thakkar, head of generative AI at Coca-Cola. I didn't even realize they had a dedicated AI role at Coca-Cola. he said we need to keep moving forward and pushing the envelope the genius out of the bottle and you're not going to put it back in yeah that's i mean for the ad for for better or worse that that is the truth i know i know what the implication of of that like there's a lot of people out there who are going to be left behind but then there's also a lot of opportunity out there for you to create a new path in your career i mean that's also what i'm saying where it's like you know you're asking me about this specific spot it's like yeah cool okay but they're able to pull off this spot as we guesstimated that you know is 10 to four times less expensive than doing this traditionally coca-cola has the money it's like okay now you can make more of these it's like you could make this animal this quote zootopia coca-cola universe and have like stories about this for the entire holiday season it doesn't have to just be your one hero advert right that you run repeatedly so like i would want to see more of that it's like okay cool we could say we could do this and save money let's make more of it yeah hopefully yeah let's yeah i mean again the toothpaste is out of the tube or the genie's out of the bottle however you want to praise it like pandora's box is open pandora's box is opened we're not we're not gonna go back to a hundred percent computer graphics ever again because some tasks are just inherently easier and better this way anything else on the coca-cola story oh that's it all right we'll move it on the coca-cola cap of the glass bottle has been uncapped i think i have some coke in the fridge i'm gonna have some after this episode all this coke talk got me thirsty we're not sponsored by coca-cola but we're open to it

24:51all right thanks everyone we'll catch you in the next episode