A familiar Christmas ad, with a local twist
For the 2024 holidays, three studios used AI to reinterpret Coca-Cola’s Holidays Are Coming commercial. The campaign included location-specific details, such as a Boston welcome sign for viewers in that city.
The interesting feature for a smaller marketing team is the adaptation. A single creative idea can have different expressions while still belonging to the same campaign.
Consider a hypothetical homeware brand launching a collection. It might want to explore different settings and customer occasions before choosing a direction. A specialist services business might need to make the same expertise relevant to different industries. A regional retailer might want each location to feel present in a shared campaign.
These are possible briefs, not claims about completed projects or proven savings. Their commercial value would depend on the audience, the quality of the work and the offer behind it. But they illustrate a more useful ambition than simply filling a content calendar with additional posts.
What would you do with more room to explore?
Small teams face choices that rarely appear in a campaign results report: the alternative concept that was never developed, the format dropped from the brief, the audience given a generic message because there was no capacity to adapt it.
Our view is that this is where AI deserves serious consideration. A bounded project could give the team more creative options to evaluate, or support a coherent set of agreed campaign drafts. The intended benefit might be better choices within the available time, rather than an immediate reduction in spending.
That changes the conversation with an agency or internal creative team. The question becomes what they could develop with suitable assistance, which parts still require specialist work, and what would make the resulting material good enough to use. The quality of the decision matters more than the number of generated images.
Coca-Cola’s speed claim needs to stay in context
Project Fizzion, announced with Adobe in May 2025, was designed to bring Coca-Cola’s brand rules into creative production. Coca-Cola claimed content could be produced up to ten times faster, while describing the project as a pilot. The announcement does not publish a detailed benchmarking method.
This is separate from the Christmas campaign. It does not establish how much that campaign saved, or what your business would save. A production-speed claim is not a tenfold improvement in marketing returns.
The practical implication is worth considering without borrowing the headline number: a brand needs a way to keep its identity intact as creative work expands. More variations can become more corrections if product facts, tone and visual requirements are not clear. For a smaller team, preserving that coherence may be as valuable as preparing the initial drafts faster.
The audience can become part of the idea
The 2024 holiday activity also included a separate interactive Santa experience. Microsoft’s customer case reports more than one million users across 43 markets in three weeks. These are participation figures, not sales or a quantified return on investment.
This opens a broader creative question: should the audience watch a campaign, contribute to it or receive something shaped around their interests?
Coca-Cola’s experience used custom technology, some of which the company described as exclusive. It was not an off-the-shelf setup available to every advertiser. An interactive experience for your own brand would need its own feasibility assessment and technical scope. A smaller campaign does not have to include one to make worthwhile use of AI.
A smaller production bill is a possibility, not a starting assumption
Creative direction, editing, usage rights, software and review all contribute to the final cost. Generating an attractive first image does not establish what it will cost to deliver an approved campaign.
The same applies to effectiveness. A campaign may be faster to prepare and still fail to persuade the right people. Better preparation gives a team more scope to produce and assess ideas; it does not guarantee demand.
For your business, a credible proposal should connect the creative ambition to a defined set of outputs and a realistic budget. That might mean one launch, selected channels and a limited set of variations. Keeping the project focused makes the opportunity easier to judge without pretending your company has Coca-Cola’s infrastructure or reach.
Bring the idea you previously ruled out
MindVerve’s AI content and campaign support can help turn that idea into a brief, explore creative directions and develop an agreed sample set of content or creative assets. The engagement can also establish review criteria for factual accuracy, brand voice and faithful product representation, alongside your existing team or agency.
Asset quantities and formats are agreed in the proposal. Paid-media spending, media buying and rights clearance are separate scopes. Custom interactive development would require its own assessment; it is not included by implication.
Which campaign would you reconsider if part of the production work could be approached differently? Tell us about the audience, the idea and the constraints. We can discuss the support that fits the project, rather than promise another brand’s results.
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Independent analysis of public company communications.
Coca-Cola · CAGNY · 18 February 2025 · p. 9Coca-Cola · Christmas campaign · 10 December 2024Coca-Cola · Project Fizzion · 15 May 2025Microsoft · Customer story · 15 April 2025