Let us now weep for Don Draper
..while we consider what AI is doing to his legacy
Today it’s time to look at adverts, unfortunately, because the tide of AI has now reached one of the biggest brands you can name: Coca-Cola. Have a look at the two ads below. It’s pretty clear which one is the AI-generated one due to the captions. But see if, in watching the AI one, you can spot the signals that it’s not been produced by humans carefully animating frames.
Truth be told, there aren’t very many: some of the movement of the polar bear family at the start, but the biggest telltale is when the lorries come into the town, and none of their wheels is actually rotating. It’s not a big thing, but this “AI-generated” ad has actually been carefully looked over for anything that would look out of place. You can bet that all the team at the ad agency went over it very carefully. Those teeth? Carefully reviewed. The appearance every single time of Coca-Cola, with that unique logo swirl? Checked, checked, checked.
Not quite so in the case of Silverside AI, which also produced an AI-generated one-minute ad for Coke. You can view it on the company’s page (and perhaps more easily on X), but there’s an absolute howler—in advertising terms—14 seconds in. Can you see it?
It’s a very fine detail, but the “Cola” in the shot above is messy: the “C” should not connect to the “o” that follows it, because that makes it look like “Coca-Coola”. You think this is a trivial point? It is, but for a gigantic brand like Coke, that’s not an allowable mistake. Which is perhaps why Silverside AI’s offering wasn’t included in the set of “AI Coke adverts” officially uploaded to YouTube.
Now, you might think that people might find something that seems to us so obviously AI-generated (they even tell us!) to be distasteful.
Not so fast, according to AdWeek:
System1, which tests emotional responses to ads, found an “overwhelmingly positive” consumer response to the AI-generated campaign, according to SVP of partnerships Andrew Tindall. The ad received a perfect 5.9 score from System1 in both the U.S. and U.K.
(I know, how can 5.9 be a perfect score? I think it is a point-decimal system which starts at 0, then 0.1, and so on. Zero-indexing! Such fun!)
But then..
Critics claimed that AI sucked the warmth and joy out of a holiday classic, and represented a larger threat to the creative community. One TikTok user went so far as to say that Coke ruined Christmas.
Tindall said that outcry over the ad is a result of “people post-rationalizing an opinion on social media,” but “that’s not how we choose brands. We choose them in split seconds based on memories built by emotions. Your ad’s success relies on how it makes the millions feel during their day-to-day lives.”
This is an interesting nexus: the point where a giant brand is knowingly using AI-generated content, and pushing that fact in people’s faces (the ad agencies were surely encouraged to tell the world that these were AI-generated ads, because they sure weren’t discouraged), and expecting a positive reaction from everyone. There has been plenty of media coverage about how this ad was made. Even so, as Ad Week interprets Tindall’s comment:
In other words, beyond the heat of social media, many people experiencing the ad in the wild might not even realize it’s made by AI.
I think that’s very true. For a lot of people, it’s irrelevant whether an advert is made by actors, cartoonists, Korean animators or huge humming banks of computers. The question is, is it any good?
On this, we go to Don Draper, the (fictional!) character in the series about advertising folk, Mad Men, who was given many remarkable quotes. In one scene, he’s showing Heinz a proposed ad campaign which shows food such as chips and hamburgers, all missing the fabled ketchup.
“The greatest thing you have working for you is not the photo you take or the picture you paint,” he tells the dubious client. “It’s the imagination of the consumer. They have no budget. They have no time limit. And if you can get into that space, your ad can run all day.”
Are we really thinking too much about these ads? What I actually found initially surprising—but on reflection not remarkable—was how unadventurous they were.
Because remember some of the videos that I previously discussed: the Gordon Ramsay AI-generated videos, such as this one:
“Surreal” describes it fairly well: the way that there’s no logic to it always reminds me of the internal logic of dreams, which make absolutely no sense once you wake up. (Same for those earthshattering ideas that you wake up, write down and then look at in the morning. “Green dogs banana lifebelt”? What?)
Here’s the thing that did not happen in the AI-generated Coke adverts: they didn’t roll with the surreal possibilities. The animals morph into the trucks which turn into sleighs loaded with Coke which explodes into stars in the sky delighting the people looking up which turns into snow which becomes those familiar wasp-waisted bottles. That’s just one possibility out of any number that you could make look convincing, and it would have a surprise factor too. If you really wanted people to sit up, that’s the sort of ad you would make.
But no: Coke instead chose to go the ultra-safe route, getting the ad agencies simply to do another version of its (now iconic) 1995 “Holidays Are Coming” advert. It’s the utterly safe option, while also sidling AI in through the side entrance so that its suspiciously bland, factually wrong (remember the non-moving wheels?) style becomes commonplace.
Obviously it has been parodied to death, which only helps Coke to spread its message, but honestly, I think this is missing a trick. The best thing about AI-generated video is its ability to make connections that humans honestly never would. If you need a reminder, watch this video. It doesn’t have to make sense; it just has to hold your attention, in this world where attention is more valuable than anything, because everyone only gets 24 hours in every day, no matter how rich they are.
So the challenge remains open: who’s going to be the first to produce an AI-generated advert that is unashamedly, delightedly, flamboyantly, wildly, clearly nothing like a human would produce?
We could have hoped that maybe it would be carmaker Porsche. Not bad, but not AI:
And it sure wasn’t Jaguar, which collapsed its brand value in the most colossal manner with just 30 seconds of the most evidently human-directed work you’ve ever seen.
After watching that, all I can say is: bring on the AI. We tried, and we failed, Mr Draper. It’s up to the machines now.
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Just watched way too many ads!