Coca-Cola at Christmas: the brand that arrives when the joy is already there

In 1931 Coca-Cola commissioned the illustrator Haddon Sundblom to paint Santa Claus for its holiday advertising, and he kept painting him until 1964: a warm, round Santa pausing with a bottle. The red coat came from earlier illustrators, as the company’s own archive points out. Coca-Cola sat down next to a holiday that already existed. The pattern runs through its best known work. In 1971 the “Hilltop” commercial gathered young people on a hillside near Rome to sing about buying the world a Coke. In 1995 a fleet of illuminated red trucks rolled through a snowy night under the line “Holidays are coming”, a spot the company has brought back in most years since. In 2011, in Australia, “Share a Coke” printed 150 popular first names on bottles, and the idea later travelled around the world.

In November 2024 Coca-Cola released a new version of the trucks ad made with generative AI. Early panel testing reported a positive response, and then the public reaction turned: viewers and many people in the creative industries called it soulless and pointed at uncanny faces and wheels that changed shape between frames. Company executives explained the choice in terms of speed and cost. In November 2025 Coca-Cola did it again, with a longer AI-made film full of animals and very few humans, and the criticism came back.

The figure Coca-Cola holds

In the books, Coca-Cola is the standard case of the affect display, one of the ten power figures a brand can execute. The figures describe body language, and this one is the face that mirrors a feeling already present and makes it larger. Coca-Cola rarely tells you why its drink is better. It appears at the table and under the tree when the good mood is already in the room, and over decades it becomes part of how those moments are remembered.

The posture explains an old paradox. From 1975 Pepsi ran the Pepsi Challenge, blind sips in which more tasters picked Pepsi, and Coca-Cola kept its lead anyway. Its claim on flavour has been debatable for a century, and it has mattered very little, because people buy the feeling they want to have. That feeling is also the brand’s defence. A competitor can copy a recipe, and it cannot copy ninety years of Christmas.

Borrowed joy has to be real

The affect display works under one condition the other figures can live without: the emotion must belong to the audience first. Children were already waiting for Santa when Sundblom painted him. In 1971 a song about harmony found a public that wanted to hear it. Finding your own name on a bottle, or a friend’s, is a small and genuine pleasure. Each time, the brand took a feeling people already had and handed it back with a bottle in the frame.

The AI trucks reversed that direction. Christmas advertising is one of the few formats where audiences notice craft and count the effort as part of the warmth. Once the story around the ad became efficiency, many viewers heard that the warmth had been produced on a budget, and a brand whose whole proposition is shared feeling had made its own feeling look manufactured.

Where affect is fragile

The books are explicit about the weakness of this figure: manufactured emotion is punished, so the job is to stay emotionally consistent under pressure. Coca-Cola has placed almost all of its value in the multiplicative part of the proposition, in context and association, and a crack there has nothing technical behind it to fall back on.

We have seen no data showing that the AI spots hurt sales, and repeating the approach suggests the company reads its numbers as reassuring. The cost, if there is one, would sit in the association between the red trucks and the feeling of the season, which builds and erodes over years and appears in no quarterly report.

Choose the tool after the figure

The useful lesson concerns sequence. Automation means different things to different figures. For a brand that holds the regulator figure, the Amazon case in the books, removing effort from the customer’s path is the posture itself, and a faster process is proof. For an affect display, the same efficiency applied to the most emotional asset in the calendar reads as a breach of the posture. The tool is neutral. The figure decides how the market will read it.

Before a new production method or cost plan touches a brand’s signature moments, someone should name the figure the brand holds. Whether a third AI-made Christmas would settle into habit or slowly wear the association down is still an open question. Mapping your figure and the moments that carry it is part of what we do, and it is best done before the production brief is written.