What COCA-COLA has learned in a trip to AI.

Generation artificial intelligence (AI) remains at the top of the 2025 agenda for marketing managers to determine how technology develops and influences the organization.

Among the brand marketing staff, COCA-COLA led the area where interest and investment increased after the debut of Openai’s CHATGPT in late 2022. But the initial movement of Beverage Giant actually provides a powerful foundation for experimenting with the company by dating the launch of CHATGPT.

The results of these experiments in the marketing media bubble were mixed from the success of the “Create Real Magic” platform to the controversial response to last year’s Christmas campaign. In the meantime, Pratik Thakar is leading the way as a global vice president and general vice president of Coca-Cola Company.

The next Q & A comes from a larger conversation that occurred in a virtual event hosted by marketing diving and was edited for clarity and simplicity. To see the playback of the entire event, you can register here.

Marketing Diving: Coca -Cola has been an early mover and has been a leader in the AI ​​space for the past few years. Where did the trip started?

Pratik Thakar: The launch of the GPT, the pre -type type of the creation AI, we actually began working with Gen AI and was conducting a campaign called “masterpiece.” There we were connected to London’s (text-video AI model) stability AI, a manufacturer of stable spread. Then we understood the importance and usefulness of Gen AI. One of the problems was the perfect thing we got, especially when proceeding with a very specific project with a particular timeline.

At that time, when we started the Gen AI Creative incubator in the late 22nd year, the GPT began and the overall overall advertising cycle began. Bain is our consulting partner and came to mind this proposal in cooperation with Openai, and we were the first person to raise our hands. We want to be part of it. ”

We published a partnership two years ago and everyone was skeptical about AI, Gen AI, and Openai. It was a relatively unknown company (but) we believed in the technology and we knew that it would be a big thing. We organized a team of six people, including law, promotion and communication and technicians, and created a sandbox.

We brought the image creation tool DALL-E and GPT together and started “Create Real Magic”. It worked very well.

How did the team grow and where do you live in the Coca -Cola organization?

There is no specific department of AI. Globally, we have two teams. One is myself and the other is a colleague who cares for internal governance inside the company. I focus on developing ideas and experience for more consumers.

All other team members live in other areas. They are part of other units and other functions, but they are early adapters and lovers who want to be part of it. They work very closely with me because they have a specific project I led. They give 50%to 40%of time every day and have a promise to participate in long -term projects.

It builds their career, abilities, and technical sets, and at the same time builds the company’s ecosystem and functions as a whole instead of creating a separate unit. The ideal scenario for everyone is basically that you don’t need people like me. Like the way we use the Internet, everything will be Ai Gen AI. We do not need the supervision or vice president of the Internet and mobile these days.

How is it balanced with the need for consumption and internal purposes with the creation AI?

So let’s take an example. AI GEN AI has already been distributed and democratized. Anyone can access and people can come up with ideas. We created an internal mechanism that all those who wanted to use Gen AI wrote a very simple form, saw a small team, and said, “It is perfectly using AI.” Perhaps it is not a specific tool. We can recommend something that is legitimate for the company’s guidelines. Also, if we have done something similar, they do not need to reissue the wheels. They can learn from it or learn from some partnerships I am doing.

Another part of my role is to approach other AI innovators in addition to creating experience and use alpha and beta model products. So we understand what innovation is because we can access the product for products before others. When they are released, we are preparing the product.

Would you like to guide you for a campaign that uses the creation AI?

Coca -Cola and Christmas were global revitalization. It is very rooted in the Coca -Cola brand. We wanted to travel and test everything that we and partners could do.

We looked at two different lenses. One, we took one of the 1990s advertisements, “Holiday is coming,” and reproduced using Gen AI. The film was very realistic but needed a lot of fantastic images and storytelling, which is very good for Gen AI. We created three versions of the film and put it in front of the consumer. All three worked well with consumers.

We also created this platform called “Create Real Magic” and created a video on how to take Santa and talk with Santa since 1931. Insight was a gift from Santa, taking pictures with Santa, or receiving a gift from Santa, but there was no opportunity or time to sit down and talk and ask questions.

We worked with Openai, Microsoft Azure and MIMIC and talked with the help of Openai by creating a 3D digital twin of the historic 1931 Santa. In fact, you can talk to Santa in 26 languages ​​around the world. It is a real time, a unique conversation, and creates a snow globe for social media based on the conversation. This kind of thing that only Gen AI can do is very true for the Coca -Cola brand. We think that technology is the place to define our ambitions.

TV commercials attracted a lot of attention and became a lightning of some of the debate about the use of Gen AI. How did people go wrong and learn from that experience?

First, it is different from entering the prompt called “Creating Advertising”. Advertisement appears. Many creative decisions are all made by humans. We worked with three other studios in LA, one in San Francisco and Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. All three studios have creative technicians. They briefly gave the 1990s film because they were engineers, early adapters and storytellers, and we knew we had the right to use it as a prompt. The film was filmed in a village in Europe. I had to take it to the next stage. Gen AI opens up the possibilities: you can show different parts of the world and appear internationally.

We also used multiple tools and had specific DOS and DOSS regarding the tools to use where the partnership was. We have a legal understanding of how these tools are built. We had our own guidelines and told us to use the tools. There was also music. We made it as human.

When we prepare all three films, we surveyed the consumers of North America, Europe and Latin America, at least three other research institutes and other consumer sets and worked very well. It not only is the average success rate in terms of acceptance, understanding and entertainment value, but also passed the Christmas advertising benchmark of ourselves.

Then in North America, our team was deployed as a programming media. We chose 12 different locations, where you can solve the content with geodaging. It is a way to distribute content to excessive personalization and other regions.

Some consumers liked it and many did not like it. They had different perspectives. The journalists reached out to demand our story. Independently, 3-4 other research institutes did not confirm with us and conducted research and published the results. Perhaps some of the people’s sectors did not like it. are you okay. We must respect the perspective of everyone. Not everyone agrees with everything we do. That’s nature.