The Coca-Cola Company tried something that felt like a turning point.
They remade their iconic Christmas ad entirely with AI, and the internet absolutely roasted them. Not polite criticism. Full backlash… People called it soulless, creepy, a betrayal of the craft that made the original stick in the first place.
That reaction isn’t just noise. It’s a signal.
For a stretch in 2025 I genuinely thought fully AI-generated video might become the dominant format for brand work. If I believed that was the future, I’d lean all the way in. But watching how audiences respond to this stuff has completely shifted my thinking, and it comes down to something most people already understand but keep ignoring.
Storytelling only works when the audience believes the story.
…If I sit you down and tell you something emotional, then you find out later it was fabricated, that trust disappears instantly. That’s the exact tension sitting inside fully AI commercials right now. They’re trying to create emotion without any real human truth behind it, and audiences can sense the gap between what’s real and what’s generated.
We just ran a social audit with an outdoor retail brand. The best performers weren’t the polished pieces (that COULD have been made with Ai)… They were human-led stories with visible craft. Real people making real decisions on set. The kind of content where you can feel someone was actually there, solving problems, reacting to what showed up in the moment.
That’s the shift. Human truth first, then AI to elevate it. Use the tech to handle the grunt work, speed up the tedious bits, push creative boundaries where it genuinely adds something. But don’t let it replace your craft, because that’s where audiences check out and scroll past.
The bigger question I keep coming back to is whether we get desensitized to AI content as it becomes the new normal, or whether people start rewarding brands that show real humans and real craft even harder than before.?