People can tell. AI has swarmed the marketing stage, leaving us to wonder where and what to use it on. But where do we draw the line? Each year, AI gets better, but so does our ability to detect it with the naked eye. Over 50% of Americans can detect whether a realistic photo is AI-generated, and that number is growing as our understanding deepens. It’s almost the uncanny valley, something wired into the “art” that makes our brains uncomfortable, that makes our emotions spiral. When a brand uses AI, it’s no different. Every day, I scroll on my phone to watch content, only to be jumpscared by countless advertisements that make me uncomfortable. They don’t show anything graphic, just someone running in the background, then disappears, an extra finger on a hand, a splash that just doesn’t look right. As a marketer, I begin to question, “Who signed off on this?” It’s sloppy, unprofessional, and downright atrocious. Thankfully, I wasn’t alone. Consumers are tired, exhausted even, study after study has shown that not only can they already spot it, but when shown identical ads, ones that AI generated were proven to be less natural, less useful. Just the word “Artificial Intelligence” decreased a consumer’s intent to buy. So why, in a market where trust is increasingly more important, would brands allow the collapse of their authenticity?
Coca-Cola Doubled Down, and They Don’t Care
We’ve all seen it, whether on TV or on social media, with someone expressing their disappointment. Coca-Cola used AI to generate its annual, iconic ad, “The Holidays are Coming.” What was a yearly gift from them to us turned into a PR disaster that they doubled down on, two years in a row. The why bothers me, though. I’ve seen countless people say “it’s cheaper,” but is it really? For a brand ingrained in culture and a campaign banking on nostalgia, it seems pointless to use a tool that, by definition, is inhuman when your slogan has been “It’s the real thing” for over 50 years.
“So is it really magic, or is this campaign fiscally tragic?”
Austin Minick
It took over 70,000 generated clips and over 100 workers to make just one of these ads. The money is still being spent, just redirected. Millions were still poured into this once beautiful campaign, and it still looked wrong. A traditional product campaign like this can run $1-3 million, and analysts estimate that using generative AI could cut that by 60-70%. That’s significant savings, until you take into account that they produced something that the internet openly declared is “AI Slop.” Not all campaigns are meant to drive direct revenue, but to build brand equity, to drive people to actually approve of your brand. For over 30 years, “The Holidays are Coming” was shown as a perfect example of that. In Q1 2025, Coca-Cola’s sales softened. Backlash wasn’t just a few online complaints about AI, but a global reaction that the ad lost its authenticity. Coca-Cola never seemed to care. When pressed on the backlash, their CMO said, “The genie is out of the bottle,” a dismissal that made consumers feel even worse than the ad did. At the time, I just dismissed it. I thought, “They are still making millions; in the end, I doubt it even hurts them.” But then I remembered the uncomfortable feeling I get when I see an AI ad. The whole point of the campaign was never to sell Coke directly; it was to invoke emotion, making the consumer feel something, which can lead to a 31% higher conversion rate and nearly double the profit of rational advertisements.
This leads me to believe that if they had not replaced feelings with an algorithm, their sales would not have softened.
Emotional Accounting, Withdrawals You Never Notice Until Your Account Is Empty
I wish that Coca-Cola was a cautionary tale about AI. It isn’t; it’s a lesson in accounting. When it comes to managing public perception, it’s all about deposits and withdrawals in a ledger you can never truly see. Brand equity is simply the accumulation of feelings people have about your brand. Coca-Cola is just a public example that has equity to spare; with every brand that makes headlines, thousands of small businesses around the world are unknowingly making the same withdrawal quietly with far less equity to spare.
The silent truth, though, is that deposits and withdrawals compound over time, like Coca-Cola. They spent 30 years compounding goodwill through this campaign; they can survive one bad Christmas, but when 2 starts a pattern, 3 becomes a repetitive problem they made into policy. With each year, their withdrawals could compound, shattering years of built brand equity, all to cut some corners.
Small businesses don’t have years, though, nor the compounded goodwill deposits to survive, making their customers feel neglected. It’s not that the Coca-Cola AI ad is a “bad ad”; it’s a format that was perfected over decades. It’s that consumers themselves feel as if these brands don’t care enough about them, even to try.
When effort is lost, so is your goodwill, and it doesn’t matter how much money and time you save when you lose the trust of consumers. With the market so saturated and brands pushing you to use AI-generated content, remember that you need to make a deposit and invest in your consumers so they can invest in you. For every brand, this is different; it’s not a one-size-fits-all strategy, but I can say that all deposits share one quality: they make consumers feel seen by someone who considered them. That is something AI cannot manufacture, no matter how many “ads” you generate.
So, Is AI Ruining Your Brand?
AI content is not only generic but is inauthentic, with the market becoming even more saturated, it’s your duty to make sure you stand out. Authenticity was never supposed to be a competitive advantage. It was supposed to be the baseline. Somewhere along the way we forgot that. The reason your brand should stand out is continuous investment into the consumer and making them feel special. Brands like Chewy, Ben & Jerry’s, and Patagonia all go out of their way to make the individual feel heard. Chewy sends handwritten sympathy cards when a customer’s pet dies. Nobody asked them to. They just did, and that small investment compounds further, through word of mouth, through user-generated content, through one customer who decides to tell everyone they know. That’s a deposit.
Consumers are begging to be heard, and the brands that will blossom in the AI generation are currently doing that, and you should too, because somewhere in the last few years, we convinced ourselves that marketing and content were a volume game. More posts, more marketing, more, more, more. In reality, the point of marketing was never about the content nor the marketing; it was the connection.