Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Andrew Sanford | News | November 4, 2025
We have Coca-Cola to thank for the “modern” iteration of Santa Claus. They took a Civil War drawing, made it more to their corporate liking, and presented a mascot of sorts who was clad in company colors and swilling their sugary beverage. If anyone gets to take that image, which has been adapted and (mostly) accepted as the mainstream look, and drive it straight into a mediocre hellscape, I guess it’s them.
The Coca-Cola company will be trotting out an AI-generated Christmas ad for the second year in a row. But don’t worry! They promise it doesn’t look awful like the last one did. Remember how that was your only complaint about it before? Also, you love any brand of Coke product and often sit around the fire sipping warm cups of it with the family while you all cry with excitement.
If all of that doesn’t sound like you, you’re wrong. Just ask the global VP and head of generative AI at Coca-Cola, Pratik Thakar. The executive recently assured The Hollywood Reporter that the public’s view of generative AI has changed for the better and that this new ad won’t look terrible like the last one did, which is kind of an insane thing to admit.
“Last year, people criticized the craftsmanship. But this year the craftsmanship is ten times better,” Thakar claimed. “There will be people who criticize — we cannot keep everyone 100 percent happy… But if the majority of consumers see it in a positive way, it’s worth going forward.” Boo this man! Not only is he wrong, but, spoiler alert, this new ad isn’t good either.
Something consistent about people who lack imagination is that they assume people’s problems with AI are that the edges aren’t smooth or we can “see the strings,” so to speak. Quite the contrary! There are plenty of pieces of art that I have loved, even if they don’t look perfectly smooth. If the idea and the effort are there, rough edges can be forgiven. I’d much rather watch someone’s poorly edited iPhone movie than something they created by plugging a sentence into a generator.
Also, that money could be going to actual artists who will create something far more inspired than what they keep getting. Nothing is exciting or original in this new ad. It feels like an executive thought, “People liked the polar bears, let’s do all the other animals,” and that’s it. There’s no thinking about why people may have liked something else. There’s also zero creative energy. It just looks boring.
We also get a horrific look at a Classic Coca-Cola Santa Claus at the end, whose face looks like it can’t move lest it shatter under the pressure of existence. A jolly, red, fat man stuck in a perpetually wrinkled smile as he begs to be freed from his painful existence. It would be funny if the implications weren’t so awful.
