The Christmas Exam

Last Christmas, two of the biggest brands on earth ran AI-generated holiday ads in the same season. One earned the highest score its testing panel can give. The other was pulled.

Coca-Cola went first. For the second year running, it remade Holidays Are Coming, the truck convoy it has been running since 1995, with generative AI. The comment sections did what comment sections do. Then System1 put the ad in front of its Test Your Ad panel and gave it 5.9 stars, the maximum the model allows, with "exceptional" ratings for short-term impact and brand fluency.

The 2024 AI version had also scored 5.9, the same mark System1 gave the traditionally made original the year before. Coke's head of generative AI, Pratik Thakar, told The Hollywood Reporter that

"this year the craftsmanship is ten times better."

McDonald's Netherlands came next, in December, with a spot built around "the most terrible time of the year." Santa got stuck in traffic and a cyclist slid through the snow, with the suggestion that you sit the whole season out in McDonald's until January. Critics online called it AI slop and accused it of wrecking the holiday mood, and by December 10 the company had taken it down, noting that many of its guests actually find this a wonderful time of year.

The production company, The Sweetshop Films, defended the work. Its CEO, Melanie Bridge, wrote that it took

"ten people, five weeks, full-time."

Emlyn Davies of Bomper Studio replied that ten people is a tiny crew next to a live-action shoot, which would also have hired actors and a choir.

Same tool, but opposite grades. So what's the exam actually testing?

System1's answer was creative consistency. The new Coke film kept every familiar ingredient, from Santa and the trucks to the snow, the onlookers and the music, and viewers didn't mind the changes as long as those were present. System1 went further than we would, concluding that

"using AI doesn't hurt ordinary viewers' enjoyment of the ad at all."

In August we wrote about a team typing "ketchup" into an AI model and getting Heinz back almost every time, because forty years of distinctive brand-building had set the default. Coke's trucks are the same story told on television. Three decades of convoy did the heavy lifting, and the AI's only job was to avoid dropping anything along the way.

AI can redraw a memory you already own. It can't build you one you never paid for.

McDonald's Netherlands had no convoy. It had a new idea, and a sour one, asking people to agree that their favorite season is miserable. We can't cleanly separate the two problems, and anyone who tells you it was purely the AI or purely the premise is guessing. Our read is that a cynical premise needed a lot of warmth to land, and warmth is exactly what audiences were checking the AI for.

Now for the numbers that complicate everybody's story. The IAB's January study found that 82 percent of ad executives believe Gen Z and millennial consumers feel positive about AI ads, while only 45 percent of those consumers actually do. That gap has widened from 32 points in 2024 to 37.

Gen Z is sharper still, with 39 percent negative against 20 percent of millennials. And yet 73 percent of the same consumers said knowing an ad was made with AI would either make them more likely to buy or make no difference.

People dislike the idea of AI ads more than they dislike sitting through a good one. That middle ground is uncomfortable, and it cuts in a direction the industry should watch closely. In System1's testing of the 2024 Coke ad, respondents weren't told it was AI-made, according to its SVP Andrew Tindall, and System1 later said the brand was wise not to mention AI in the ad itself. Meanwhile, more than half of the IAB's consumers want fully AI-generated ads disclosed, and fewer than half of advertisers say they always disclose.

If the best-scoring AI ad is the one nobody notices, the industry has built itself an incentive to hide it.

That's how trust gets spent, one unlabeled spot at a time.

There's one more party sitting this exam, and it's us. The Christmas ad has long been one of the year's great commissions, the brief that feeds directors, animators, composers, choirs and a small army of crew. The Grocer reported that Coke's 2025 film came from five AI specialists who generated more than 70,000 clips in 30 days. You can admire that and still notice what it subtracts. A brand can pass the audience's test while the industry that used to make its ad fails a different one.

So, with the big Christmas spots about to start landing, here's the exam we'll be grading them on. Feel free to borrow it.

Is the AI redrawing a memory the brand already owns, or trying to invent one from scratch? The first has a decent record. The second just got pulled in the Netherlands.

Would the idea still work shot on a phone with real people? If the only thing holding it up is the rendering, there was never an idea.

Where did the savings go? Into a bigger idea, or just a shorter crew list? Audiences can't see the invoice, but everyone in our industry can.

Would you put "made with AI" in the first frame? If the honest answer is no because it might hurt the scores, think about it before the lights go up.

Christmas ads are the one brief where the product barely matters and the feeling is the whole job. People remember who gave them that feeling for decades, which is the only reason Coke's trucks still work.

Whatever you build it with this year, make something people will want back next December.