Large Corporations Capitalizing Off of St. Nick
Many companies produce special Christmas advertisements to promote their brands during the holiday season.
Christmas will arrive in just six weeks, much to the delight of our university students who see the holiday as a “light at the end of the tunnel” after surviving exams. This jolly season is exciting for large corporate brands, as many like to produce Christmas-specific ads as a way to capitalize off of the holiday by appealing to the festive spirit of the audience.
Coca-Cola is infamous for its association with Christmas, with Santa Claus himself returning as a temporary brand mascot every year. The company’s association with Christmas started in the 1920’s, and it was created with the intention that good-ole St. Nick would bring a yearly nostalgic and sentimental vibe to the brand which would entice consumers.
This year, Coca-Cola found a new way to raise their profits even higher: artificial intelligence. On their official YouTube channel, Coca-Cola released their annual ad called “Holidays are Coming” a few weeks back. The video comes with a footnote stating it was “created by Real Magic AI.” Public reception of AI on the whole has been negative ever since ChatGPT became popular a few years ago, and it has only gotten worse as software like Sora 2 continue getting better at creating realistic, deep-fake videos.
It’s understandable that a large corporation like Coca-Cola would want to use AI to create their advertisements, as creating them manually would take much longer and they’d have to pay the employees who worked on the project. However, looking at the YouTube comments underneath this ad show Coca-Cola using AI in their ads is equivalent to them shooting themselves in the foot. Many people are disgusted by the brand’s decision, saying that it’s not in the “Christmas spirit” to take jobs away from animators and artists. Others are joking that Pepsi, Coca-Cola’s rival company, is receiving free advertising from the Coca-cola ad as the public doesn’t want to support a company that proudly uses AI in their marketing.
Big name brands trying to sell their products aren’t the only ones using the Christmas holiday to garner attention for themselves. Many charities also take advantage of the spirit-of-giving to bring awareness to their causes. For example, Covenant House is famous for this quote “How young do they have to be before we give a damn?” in their ad portraying both a teenager and a baby sleeping in a bus stop during a cold Toronto snowstorm, before asking for donations. These tactics are effective, as charities (including shelters, food banks, etc) see some of their highest community engagement times around the holiday season. These Christmas ads are really beneficial, as many impoverished families wouldn’t survive the winter without donated food, gloves, scarves, blankets, etc.
