What Coca-Cola learned by leaning into AI for ads

Maybe getting comfortable with AI for marketing is as simple as getting comfortable with social media for marketing.

1️⃣ Embrace uncertainty and change.

2️⃣ Be prepared to react, reinvent and rethink.

That’s exactly what marketers had to do back when social media came on the scene.

I’ve been thinking about this ever since I heard the legendary ad creative PJ Pereira, founder of Pereira O'Dell and cofounder of Silverside AI, share how they tackled Coca-Cola’s holiday campaign using AI.

This ad didn't go over well with some consumers and ad industry execs (or me, for that matter).

But Pereira said that instead of playing it safe, Coke and Silverside leaned into uncertainty, building flexibility into the process and adapting in real time.

PJ Pereira of Pereira O’Dell and Silverside AI speak at the HumanX conference

Photo by Debra Aho Williamson

One key decision? Removing AI-generated humans from the Coca-Cola AI ad because they didn’t look right. But weeks later, after the campaign had aired, new technology emerged that solved the problem.

➡️ The big lesson: What looks cutting-edge today may feel outdated tomorrow. Marketers have to accept that their work will never be “done” in the traditional sense.

Pereira framed this as a shift in mindset. Working with AI means running into the storm rather than staying on its edges.

And things are changing very quickly in AI video. During the presentation, Pereira showed a compilation video of what AI could do - and said that many of the techniques weren’t even possible when they created the Coke ad.

It was fascinating to hear Pereira liken today's creatives who use AI tools for advertising to past generations of creatives who figured out television commercials and interactive advertising.

Pereira pointed to video games as an example of what’s coming. Instead of writing fixed scripts for characters, developers now give them backstories and let AI generate their dialogue in real time. That same principle could apply to advertising, he said.

In other words, what if marketing assets weren’t static but evolved based on context, consumer behavior, or even their own “thinking”?

The question worth chasing, Pereira suggested, isn’t just how to make AI-generated content better. It’s this: What happens when an idea can generate its own ideas?

Me: Mind blown.