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Coca-Cola has rolled out its third generative AI initiative of the year, this time as part of a global holiday campaign.
The 130-year-old brand is opening its vault to the public via Create Real Magic, an artificial intelligence-powered holiday card generator. Built on the combined capabilities of GPT-4 and Dall-E 2, within a few clicks people can experiment with holiday-themed content, from selecting images to personalizing holiday greetings through generative AI-driven text capabilities, shareable across social platforms and WhatsApp.
“We are almost democratizing this tool for people to connect in a more personalized way,” said Pratik Thakar, global head of generative AI at Coca-Cola. “Because the way [you] prompt and write messages is unique, what [you] create never gets created again.”
Available through Dec. 26, the AI tool provides access to some of the beverage giant’s most iconic assets, including the cherished depictions of Santa Claus created in 1931 by Haddon Sundblom as well as the company’s family of polar bears, first introduced in 1993.
Earlier this year, Coke inked a deal with ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Bain & Company. That was followed by Coca-Cola’s first Create Real Magic campaign in March, which allowed creators to build out-of-home digital art meant for billboards in New York and London. The AI campaign saw nearly 120,000 image creations within 11 days, all without utilizing paid media. Users, on average, spent nearly eight minutes on the platform, said Thakar.
While some marketers have experienced the AI language gap when using previous versions of AI tools such as GPT-3, Coca-Cola’s latest campaign takes advantage of the newly available versions of ChatGPT and Dall-E, allowing people to craft greetings in regional languages for the campaign, which spans Europe, Japan, India and Latin America.
“It’s the era of AI, and we are ahead of the curve compared to many other marketers. And that’s the way we want to go,” added Thakar.
Testing, learning and scaling AI
The company’s marketing strategy involves testing a variety of AI tools and partners before choosing the ones deemed safe and suitable. Simultaneously, its campaign strategy centers on piloting campaigns, deriving learnings and refining them for scalability–an approach dependent on its team of creative technologist and AI artists.
For instance, after launching the AI pilot campaign in March, these experts that congregated at Coca-Cola’s three-day workshop named the ‘Real Magic Creative Academy’ in August, recognized its user experience was too complex and required increased technological capabilities among people.