In February 2024, US advertising agencies Pereira O’Dell and Serviceplan Group announced they would be launching an AI-powered innovation lab for advertising and marketing.
The aim was to bridge the gap between tech startups and well-known brands, and Silverside AI was born. Roughly nine months later the company’s work made global headlines with the – now famous – AI generated Coca-Cola ad for the iconic ‘The Holidays are Coming’ campaign – inspired by the 1995 advert.
Two other AI studios worked on the AI ad campaign – Secret Level and Wild Card – both producing their own separate takes on Coke’s brief.
The use of AI in the campaign stirred controversy globally and social media comments quickly crossed over into mainstream media coverage, much of which took issue with the use of AI-generated video.
However, just three months on, it seems that AI has already moved closer to being normalised and more widely accepted in creative processes – begging the question: was the Coca-Cola ad backlash warranted, or simply a reaction to changing times?
FutureWeek spoke to Silverside AI’s founders, PJ Periera and Rob Wrubel, to get their take on the production of the ad and its creative process.
How did the creative process for ‘Holidays are Coming’ differ from a more conventional ‘AI-free’ process?
PJ: From the beginning, it was an experiment of paying homage to an idea – the iconic ‘Holidays are Coming’ ad – that has been around for decades, and doing an AI version of it. We mostly thought about how we could create the ‘impossible’ that would be too complicated to do in a regular production – such as epic aerial and crane shots of landscapes.
With AI, you can do much bigger things than what you could do normally. But we didn’t want the style of it to compete with ‘reality’ – it’s a hyper-reality and a slightly more illustrated look.
With a traditional process, you would write a script, storyboard, shoot everything, and then do post-production, and whatever content you have is what you have. With AI, the process is more compact. You write, you prompt, you edit, then you repeat. It’s a very quick cycle until the point you deliver.
This is a more naturally creative process than traditional ones, because we’ve industrialised creativity in the professional world where one person is in charge of a small aspect of creativity, and the work gets constantly handed around.
I think with these new processes, tools and production, the way we create and produce allows us to stay creative for much longer.
Rob: The traditional creative process today has indeed been industrialised, and creativity often gets overwhelmed by process. There are so many steps in such large teams.
The creation of the Coca-Cola advert was about seven people iterating every few hours, including members of the Coca-Cola team – who were just as part of the creative process.
So you don’t have these boundaries between the client and the creative team as much, and there aren’t all these people – such as project managers and other leaders – making the creative process dry up. It was more like an agile software process in this sense.
What tools did you use?
PJ: We have our own tech called Director Magic, that integrates a lot of tools such as Leonardo AI, Luna AI and Runway. It automatically turns a script into a series of prompts and generates images so you can have the first steps of an ad quickly – and then you can tweak it. It makes things faster and you get the first edit much faster.
Rob: With the other groups that were producing ads too, we didn’t collaborate with them. We were only collaborating with the Coke team. Coca-Cola is a global brand, so you can’t have a model where the images you’ve used to train haven’t been licensed.
The tools are changing every week – it’s radical. We didn’t want to put our creatives in the position of having to be technologists. So our own proprietary technology teams built systems so that our creative teams don’t need to become prompt engineers for each tool.
Why do you think there was so much controversy around the ad?
Rob: We’ve seen this resistance throughout history. After Toy Story was made, everyone said traditional animation will never be replaced by computer graphics – and then within about three years, traditional animation had disappeared. We also used to say the web will never be a meaningful advertising inventory…and look where we are today.
There is always a ‘wall of worry’ people climb over. It’s a resistance to new technology that people are intimidated by because there’s a lot of uncertainty around it.
You also have a traditional reaction to aesthetic values. The aesthetics that people complain about will be the norm in 30-days time. We’ve already seen human likeness change so dramatically [in video production], for example.
I think that backlash is what you see in most technological shifts.
How do you think this tech will evolve over the next few years?
PJ: The world will eventually come to terms with the use of AI in advertising. AI is inescapable from this point on – and it’s just going to be used in higher or lower levels in everything. There will only be different levels of AI use. From a certain point, all movies will use AI in the creative process.
We are in a phase of pioneers, of people who look at AI and get excited about it. It’s those people who will have the most experience when it’s available and being used by everyone.
Rob: AI is going to democratise creative processes and compelling, engaging, moving experiences, not just the ad or the creative expression, but the strategy and the media.
For example, we launched a campaign with Pierce’s Pledge – a tiny non-profit in San Francisco committed to stopping gun violence – where we created very engaging work for a fraction of the cost. It’s not unlike what happened with paid search, where a small maple syrup producer in Vermont could suddenly reach a national market and benefitted the most.
AI is going to make people more creative and give people more time back in their day to get on with creative work.
We built hundreds of versions of ads for all the markets Coke operates in – this would have taken a very long time otherwise. AI allows us to reach more people and gives creative people more time back in their day to be more creativity. This tech can actually unleash creativity, empower more people, and give them their Sundays back.
