It’s the season of carols, holly, mulled wine and gifts with the golden voices of Jim Reeves, Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby wafting in the background. But this year the Christmas magic is sprinkled with a fair dose of Artificial Intelligence as brands release end-of-year ads created through machine learning.

Globally Coca-Cola and Spotify’s recent holiday ads created with AI attracted severe backlash. Viewers especially poured outrage over Coca-Cola’s re-imagining of its classic ‘Holidays Are Coming’ 1995 ad with AI, calling it ‘soulless. But that has not deterred Indian agency Rediffusion from going the AI route for its Christmas ad for paint brand Kansai Nerolac, released early this week.

The ad shows Santa ploughing through snow carrying a sack full of gifts for children, and then plodding back to a dull-looking home. The kids decide to give his home a bright makeover using Nerolac paint. The entire ad, including the children with their lifelike expressions and movements, has been made with artificial intelligence by RAID (Rediffusion AI Design) studio.

Ask Sandeep Goyal, Managing Director, Rediffusion, why the agency chose to make a 100 per cent AI-generated ad despite the negative criticism that a seasoned advertiser like Coca-Cola attracted, and he says, “We have a far superior product, with real-looking humans – their skin colour, the iris of their eyes – we have worked really hard.”

Why have so many brands gone in for 100 per cent AI-generated ads this season? Is there cost saving? “Oh, there is a tonne of saving,” responds Goyal, also pointing to how easy it was to create a snow setting. 

Creative opinion is still divided though on 100 per cent AI-generated ads. Prathap Suthan, managing partner and chief creative officer at Bang in the Middle, says that the viewer hate is because there is still an element of artificialness, especially in the human models created in the ads. “Give it a year or two and the AI ads will look really natural,” he says. 

Personalised poems

Meanwhile, it’s not just ad agencies going the AI route this Christmas. Common folk have embraced AI to send out their greetings. Move over gifs and emojis. Dropping into your inbox are personalised poems with music set to them generated by AI tools like Suno. Just describe the type of song you want and describe what you need in the lyrics, and AI does the rest. 

Many are sending out imaginative personalised visuals generated by Chatgpt or Meta AI and Microsoft co-pilot. Creating your own visually rich greeting card, with an original melody and lyrics is possible within minutes. 2025 really is going to be the year of AI – the signs are all there!