always the real thing
Seeding the story: Coca-Cola released its second AI-generated holiday commercial, prompting comparisons to last year’s offering. Mostly, it’s about production stats: how many people worked on it, whether fewer humans were needed, and how much the visuals have “improved.” The prevailing sentiment: Coke avoided showing humans because the tech still can’t render them convincingly. There are nearly no humans in the ad. Aside from Santa, every character is an animal: raccoons, squirrels, polar bears, all watching the Coke trucks roll by. They don’t just appear in forests; they’re perched on balconies and clustered along suburban streets. At one point, a group of squirrels is peering down at crowds of people far below, reduced to silhouettes. The score asserts: “It’s always the real thing.” And beneath the wordmark: Real Magic.
My grain of thought: Last year’s Coke ad depicted people. Imperfectly, sure, but still recognizably human. Viewers could locate themselves in the frame, which meant they could critique what they saw. This year, that dynamic is gone. Humans are implied, not represented. We become animals by proxy. The production team said they only attempted animal facial expressions now because the tech was finally “good enough.” But the absence of humans and the hyper-real expressions on animals signal a reversal: instead of anthropomorphizing animals upward, humans are pulled downward. The human role is outsourced. We’re no longer the receiving species, we’re just one living creature among others. Above it all is Santa Claus, a construct of Coca-Cola, placing the truck into the world and sets everything in motion, the hand of creation. He’s the only human with agency, existing outside the everyday realm. If the 2024 spot reaction was, “That’s a weird version of us,” 2025 offers no such entry point. We’ve been removed from the scene. We just watch side-by-side with raccoons. Coke isn’t defending its use of AI anymore, it’s aligning with it. Like the unstoppable caravan, it’s coming; humans, like all other creatures, are subjugated to it. The subtext is, if we’re not pictured, we can’t complain. Representing audiences as animals creates a narrative bypass, softening the existential tension, making acceptance feel… natural. Real Magic. Real Thing. Real enough for us.
