Coca-Cola brought back the trucks this week, and once again it made them out of nothing. Second year running. Same red convoy, same snow, same warm windows in the same small towns, all of it generated rather than filmed. Last year the reaction was loud enough that plenty of people assumed the experiment would quietly end. It did not. They ran it back, bigger, and said so out loud.
I watched it three times. The first time I was looking for the seams, because everybody is. The second time I stopped looking and just let it play. The third time I got annoyed, and it took me a while to work out at whom.
Not at the technology. The craft has improved. The hands mostly behave now.
What annoyed me is that a brand that has spent ninety years selling the feeling of a specific human warmth has decided that feeling can be assembled without any humans in the frame, and has not been straight with anyone about the trade.
Doing something twice is not an experiment anymore, it is a position, and a position obligates you to defend it in public.
Here is the part that gets lost in the discourse about whether it looks good. Nobody outside the industry grades a holiday spot on render quality. They grade it on whether it makes them feel the thing they felt when they were nine. Coke's entire equity is nostalgia, and nostalgia is a claim about real memory. When the artifact carrying that claim is synthetic, you have introduced a small, permanent asterisk into the one asset you cannot rebuild.
That may still be worth it. That is a legitimate call for a company with Coke's cost pressure and Coke's volume of seasonal content. Speed is real. Scale is real. Producing dozens of market-specific cuts without dozens of shoots is a genuine advantage, not a gimmick.
What is not legitimate is the framing. The public line has been about innovation and about honoring the original, which is the corporate equivalent of changing the subject. The honest line is shorter. We can make a hundred versions of this for the price of one, we accept that some of you will find it hollow, and we think the math works.
Coke's entire equity is nostalgia, and nostalgia is a claim about real memory.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms. When a client will not name the tradeoff, it is usually because naming it would require someone senior to own it. So it gets laundered into innovation language and everyone nods.
Say the quiet thing. Audiences forgive a tradeoff they can see. They do not forgive being managed.
Anyway. I sang Last Christmas at karaoke on Saturday, badly, and the host called me baby and meant it. No render farm involved.