Unchained’s Chief Content Officer Toby Martin unpacks the Christmas campaign that features Santa, software, and seventy thousand AI videos.
Every year, there are three things you can rely on: the John Lewis debate (“did it make you cry?”), someone in your office insisting Die Hard is definitely a Christmas film, and the Coca-Cola trucks rumbling into our collective consciousness like a festive Bat-Signal.
But 2025’s Coca-Cola advert came with a novel talking point: it wasn’t shot on a snowy mountain range, or in a studio filled with crew members and a very cold Santa. Instead, it was built - piece by piece, frame by frame - inside an AI-powered creative workshop run by a tiny team of humans and a handful of machines.
And honestly? The story of how they made it is far more interesting than any outrage cycle on Twitter/X/Threads/Whatever-We’re-Calling-It-Today.
Coca-Cola didn’t throw away the “Holidays Are Coming” DNA. The red trucks, the choral swell, Santa’s red livery (yes, a Cola construct). All the traditional ingredients were left intact.
But, in a decision that was equal parts bravery and madness, they decided to rebuild the entire thing using generative AI.
Instead of the traditional “write script → storyboard → shoot → edit,” they used what the creators described as a looping, iterative, almost software-style workflow.
It went something like this: write a rough idea, prompt the AI to visualise it, see what comes out, tweak, re-prompt, repeat, repeat more, repeat again, repeat repeat repeat.
At any one time, only around seven people were actually in the room prompting and adjusting the visuals. The total extended team was maybe 20-ish. Normally, a Coke Christmas production would require half the population of a small village.
Over the course of the project, the AI generated more than 70,000 individual clips, which were then stitched together into the final film. But that wasn’t the end of it: real artists then hand-painted over wonky frames, compositing layers, tweaking lighting, and correcting details the way a traditional VFX team would.
One of the cleverest tools in the process was Silverside’s internal system called Director Magic (not yet available to ordinary Joes like you and me).
Feed it a script, a storyboard, a few annotations, and a handful of references and it generates batches of prompts, coordinates different AI models, and spits out scenes in the style you’ve defined.
Under the hood, Director Magic juggled tools like Sora, Veo 3, Stable Diffusion, DALL·E, Leonardo, Runway, Topaz, and more - each doing a different part of the work.
Interestingly, Coca-Cola decided not to use AI for the music.
The choir you hear is formed of real humans, voices, and musicians. Whilst AI visuals can look magical, the soundtrack needed human warmth.
It’s the same reason Pixar doesn’t AI-generate orchestral scores. Some parts of Christmas are sacred.
Here’s my favourite stat: they produced the first full rough cut of the entire advert within three days of the initial meeting.
Three. Days.
Traditional animation studios would take three days just to argue about the size of the storyboard panels.
That speed also meant they could create hundreds of versions for different countries, swapping city skylines, text languages, animals, even little cultural cues - without needing to reshoot a single scene.
It wouldn’t be Christmas without a bit of festive grumbling.
Yes, some animators and commentators weren’t thrilled.
Yes, there were AI inconsistencies.
Yes, certain frames were a bit melty if you paused at the wrong moment.
And yes, the debate about AI vs human creativity rumbles on louder than ever.
Some columnists declared the advert “soulless,” “creepy,” and lamented the loss of traditional craft.
I get it. This stuff touches nerves.
But here’s the thing I keep coming back to…
Ask anyone outside the marketing and tech bubble how they felt watching the advert.
They won’t say, “Ah yes, I believe they used a diffusion model here,” or “Did you notice how the truck chassis was inconsistent across the different clips?”
They’ll say, “That was cute,” “it made me feel Christmassy,” and, “I sent it to my mum.”
Advertising, at its core, is about feeling. It always has been.
We’ve moved through eras of real film, CGI, greenscreen, motion capture, animation, and photogrammetry, and not once has the average viewer cared how it was made - only whether it made them feel something, and whether it was worth sharing.
And whether you loved the advert or picked it apart frame by frame, one thing is certain:
Most adverts will be made like this in the future.
The real question now is:
How will you use tools like this to make your brand memorable?
The genie is out of the bottle, and this year he’s wearing a red suit.