Generative artificial intelligence (AI) stays at the highest of the 2025 agenda for marketers as they work to find out how the technology will evolve and affect various functions of their organizations.
Pratik Thakar, global vice chairman and head of generative AI at Coca-Cola
Permission granted by Coca-Cola
Among brand marketers, Coca-Cola has led the way in which in an area that saw a surge in attention and investment following OpenAI’s debut of ChatGPT in late 2022. But the beverage giant’s early moves actually pre-date the launch of ChatGPT, giving the corporate a powerful base from which to experiment.
The results of those experiments, at the least within the marketing media bubble, have been mixed, from the successes of its “Create Real Magic” platform to the contentious response to last yr’s Christmas campaign. During all of it, Pratik Thakar has been leading the way in which as the worldwide vice chairman and head of generative AI for The Coca-Cola Company.
The following Q&A draws from a bigger conversation that occurred during a virtual event hosted by Marketing Dive and has been edited for clarity and brevity. You can register here to look at a replay of the total event.
MARKETING DIVE: Coca-Cola was an early mover and has been a pacesetter within the generative AI space the previous few years. Where did that journey start?
PRATIK THAKAR: Pre-GPT launch, pre-hype cycle of generative AI, we actually began working with gen AI and we were working on a campaign called “Masterpiece.” That’s where we connected with [text-to-video AI model] Stability AI in London, the makers of Stable Diffusion. That’s after we understood the importance and the utility of gen AI. One of the things was the perfection we were getting, especially if you find yourself working on a really specific project with specific timelines.
That’s after we began our gen AI creative incubator, in late ‘22, and that is when GPT got launched and the entire hype cycle began. Bain is our consulting partner, they usually got here up with this proposal of collaborating with OpenAI, and we were the primary one to lift our hand and said, “Yes, we would like to be a part of it.”
We announced that partnership two years ago, and everybody was so skeptical about AI, gen AI, OpenAI. It was with a comparatively unknown company [but] we believed in that technology and we knew that it was going to be big. We put together a team of six people — including legal, public affairs and communications and tech people — and we created a sandbox.
We brought DALL-E, their image creation tool, and GPT together, and we launched “Create Real Magic.” It worked out thoroughly.
How has that team grown and where does it live inside the Coca-Cola organization?
There isn’t any specific department of AI. Globally, we’ve got a team of two: One is myself and one other is a colleague taking care of internal governance inside the company. I focus on more consumer-facing ideas and experience development.
Other team members are all living in numerous geographies. They’re part of various units and different functions, but they’re early adopters and enthusiasts that desired to be a part of this. They have specific projects which I’m leading, so they work with me very closely. They give their 50% to 40% of time on daily basis, they usually have a commitment for long-term project involvement.
It builds their profession, their capability, their skill set, and at the identical time, it also builds the corporate’s ecosystem and capability overall, slightly than making a separate unit. The ideal scenario for everybody is essentially that we do not need an individual like me. Everything shall be gen AI, like the way in which we use the web and we use mobile; we do not actually need the director or VP of web and mobile nowadays.
How are you balancing the needs of each consuming-facing and internal uses with generative AI?
So let me offer you an example. Gen AI is already distributed, it’s democratized. Everyone has access to it, and folks can provide you with ideas. We have created an internal mechanism where everyone who wants to make use of gen AI fills out a quite simple form and our small team looks at it and perhaps we are saying, “That’s an ideal use of AI” — perhaps just not that individual tool. We can recommend something else which is legally inline with the corporate’s guideline prospective. Also, if we’ve got done something similar, then they need not reinvent the wheel: They can learn from that or learn from a number of the partnerships I’m doing.
Another a part of my role, aside from creating experiences, can also be reaching out to other AI innovators and tapping into their alpha and beta model products so we’ve got early access to their products before anyone else and so we understand what innovation is coming in. We start constructing our products and our consumer-facing experiences with them while it is a hidden secret for the remaining of the world. When they launch, we’re ready with our products.
Can you walk us through a campaign that utilized generative AI?
Coca-Cola and Christmas was a world activation. It’s very ingrained with the Coca-Cola brand. We desired to scale our journey and stress test all of the things we and our partners can do.
We looked through two different lenses. One, we took one in every of our Nineteen Nineties commercials, “Holidays are Coming,” and we recreated that using gen AI. That film required a variety of super realistic but fantastical imagery and storytelling, and that is what gen AI does thoroughly. We ended up creating three versions of that film, and we put it out in front of consumers. All three of them worked thoroughly with consumers.
We also created this platform called “Create Real Magic” and we took our Santa from 1931 and put together a video about how you may converse with Santa. The insight was that everybody has shaken hands with Santa, taken an image with Santa or gotten a present from Santa, but nobody had that chance or time to sit down down with Santa and have a conversation and ask questions.
We worked with OpenAI, Microsoft Azure and Mimic and we created a 3D digital twin of our historic 1931 Santa after which put a conversational AI into that with OpenAI’s help. You can actually consult with Santa in 26 different languages the world over. It’s an actual time, unique conversation, after which, based on your conversation, it’ll create a snow globe for you for social media. That type of stuff, which only gen AI can do, may be very true to the Coca-Cola brand. We feel that is where the technology does justice to our ambition.
The TV business drew a variety of attention and have become a lightning rod for a number of the controversy over the usage of gen AI. How are people getting gen AI improper, and what did you learn from that have?
First, it is not such as you input one prompt saying “create an ad” and it pops out an ad. A number of creative decisions are all made by humans. We worked with three different studios, one in L.A., one in San Francisco and one in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. All three studios have creative technologists. They are engineers, early adopters and storytellers, and we gave them as a temporary our Nineteen Nineties film because we knew that we had rights to make use of that because the prompt. That film was shot in Europe, in a single village. I needed to take it to the subsequent level. Gen AI opens up possibilities: you may show different parts of the world, it becomes international.
We also used multiple tools, and we had certain dos and don’ts by way of what tools to make use of where we’ve got our partnerships. We have a legal understanding of how those tools are built. We had our own guideline and we told our team to make use of those tools. There was also the music; we composed that with humans.
Once we had all three movies ready, we researched it extensively with consumers in North America, Europe and Latin America, with at the least three different research agencies and different sets of consumers, and it worked thoroughly. It was not only a median success rate by way of its acceptability, understanding and entertainment value, but it surely passed our own and competitions’ Christmas ad benchmarks.
Then, in North America, our team deployed with programmatic media. We had chosen 12 different locations, and that is where you may solve content with geotagging. It’s hyper personalization and a way of distributing content to different regions.
Some consumers loved it, a variety of people didn’t prefer it. They had a special perspective. Journalists reached out to ask for our side of the story. Three or 4 different research agencies, independently, without even checking with us, they conducted studies they usually published those results. Maybe some sectors of individuals didn’t prefer it. That’s okay. We must respect everyone’s perspective. Not everyone will agree with the whole lot we do; that is nature.
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