The truck is different in every shot of Coca-Cola’s AI Christmas ad. Surely that matters?

Early knee-jerk opinion seems split between “Everyday folk really don’t know or care about AI wobbles, stop being an ad-land asshat,” and “This put a bunch of creatives out of work. Where’s the Christmas magic in that?!”

Similar opinions were hurled at last year’s ad, but for me, another issue caught my eye: wonky wheels.

Remember the 2024 ad, with its also-wonky humans and the infamous skiddy truck wheels? They didn’t seem to rotate as the oddly shaped trucks smeared their way along icy roads. 

If I were at Coke Ad HQ, my 2025 pep talk would have gone something like this: “Right, last year’s was a bit of a kerfuffle, but I think we just about got away with it, except for the wheels. Let’s 100% nail them this year. No weird wheels, OK?!” 

High-fives all round, etc.

Your first play of the ad was probably as uneventful as mine. The animal styles are all over the place. Coca-Cola seemed to have side-stepped last year’s creepy humans by not featuring any at all. But at least the wheels were spinning. Result! Improvement! A year of innovation pays off…

My opinion in the second playthrough wasn’t quite so generous. 

Ugh, the wheels again. 

Of the 100 people Coca-Cola says worked on the ad, not one of them seems to have noticed the funky wheel issue that peppers the 60-second film. 

Only two of the 11 truck scenes feature the same truck, specifically the same wheel layout. Some had four wheels, while others had 22 (assuming the standard dual-wheel setup as seen on 18-wheelers). Some had them in arrangements that defied physics. Some would have caused the trailer to collapse. Some would prevent the truck from turning. Sure, it’s a niche gripe, but the truck is the main character. It always has been. I’m fairly sure Pixar would have noticed if Lightning McQueen had six wheels or the Duracell Bunny randomly grew three ears.

This is partly an AI thing but mostly a human thing. 

Let me explain.

First, here’s how you make an AI ad like this. 

You feed a bunch of reference images into an image diffusion model then generate the key frames (first and last) for each scene. 

Then you ask a video diffusion model to generate the bits between the key frames. 

Simple.

You sweat the key frames as they are, well, key. Apparently, the team generated 70,000 of them. The wheel-apocalypse probably happened at this stage. Maybe they went wheel-blind?

So, how would you fix that? 

Ideally, you train a dedicated model (a LORa) just on trucks with the right number of wheels. Then you sideload it back into your image-generation model to spit out consistent trucks with consistent wheels. 

Maybe the team did this.

At the end of the day, 100 passionate people worked their socks off to make this. Massive credit to them, but... those wheels. I just can’t.

The human part is arguably more awkward. If a production team of 100 genuinely didn’t spot the weird wheels, that’s not great. 

It’s arguably more worrying if they did spot them but let it ride for whatever reason. Maybe they couldn’t get it working in the tech?

Craft, rigour and attention to detail are precious commodities and have always been the foundation of great ads. 

Was it a budget or scheduling issue? 

Chief marketing officer Manolo Arroyo mentioned that they condensed the production schedule from 12 months to just one month last year. It seems they took the Elon Musk approach to efficiencies and ended up with the old “Good wheels, fast, cheap. Pick two” mantra.

The conspiracy theorists among us would say this is all on purpose. 

A conversation starter. A ploy to get someone to write a hot take in The Drum. 

Sure, that’s plausible, but I’d argue that nailing the controversial AI used in the 2025 Coke ad, after last year, would come higher up the PR list.

Will any non-ad-landers notice? 

Probably not.

 So should anyone care? 

Abso-hecking-lutely. Other brands, marketing agencies, and I look up to Coke as a beacon of brand-building excellence. 

Coke shouldn’t obsess over details because everyone will notice. It should obsess over details. 

We need to hold ourselves to a higher standard, especially as the rules for what “good” looks like in AI-generated content are wearing out like the tread on a wonky wheel. 

If adland doesn’t care about the wheels coming off, who will? 

Get in touch with Dino on LinkedIn

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