AI Ads & Audience Trust: The Coca-Cola Test Case
TL;DR
Journalist and 'story hunter' Josh Davis analyzes Coca-Cola's AI advertising experiments and his own telephonic AI project to argue that resistance to AI is temporary, while the technology's real value lies in eliminating repetitive labor and democratizing storytelling by removing traditional gatekeepers.
🎠Generational Perceptions & Brand Backlash 3 insights
Youth treats AI as comedy, adults as utility
Younger audiences predominantly view AI-generated visuals as comedic content suited for disposable memes, while older generations perceive the same technology as a meaningful communications tool despite recognizing its hallucinations and uncanny qualities.
Coca-Cola's AI ads tested better blind
Coca-Cola's 2024 and 2025 AI-generated holiday campaigns faced intense backlash from creative communities but tested positively with general audiences who remained unaware of their AI origin, leading the brand to refine rather than abandon the approach.
Technology criticism is temporal
Current AI backlash mirrors historical resistance to CGI, evidenced by nostalgic requests to 'bring back' Coca-Cola's polar bears from the 2000s despite those animations facing identical criticism for being 'soulless' and 'fake' when first introduced.
đź”” The Knocker-Upper Effect on Labor 3 insights
Obsolete jobs create unforeseen new roles
Davis cites 'knocker-uppers'—workers paid to tap windows and wake factory employees before alarm clocks existed—to illustrate that technological disruption consistently eliminates specific professions while creating new opportunities that are impossible to imagine from the current vantage point.
Marketing drudgery faces automation
Repetitive tasks including ad placement, versioning, sequencing, and cut-downs are rapidly being automated through platforms like Meta's ad manager, which now gamifies AI optimization by assigning points for automated enhancements.
Liberation from industrial-era tasks
AI eliminates dehumanizing repetitive labor such as data entry and manual media buying, theoretically freeing creative professionals to focus on high-level strategy and genuine human connection rather than mechanical execution.
đź“ž Democratizing Storytelling 3 insights
The 'Not Josh' AI experiment
Davis created an AI phone bot that interviews callers and transforms their stories into short documentary films within minutes, successfully processing thousands of calls from people sharing intimate details about wild animal attacks and ghost sightings.
Non-judgmental AI unlocks confession
Callers opened up more deeply to the AI than expected because it lacked human judgment, with approximately 50% of participants confirming they had seen ghosts when asked, demonstrating that people disclose freely to artificial listeners.
Elimination of creative gatekeepers
AI removes institutional barriers in publishing and Hollywood, allowing individuals to 'green-light' their own stories instantly without waiting for studio approval or incurring expensive production costs.
Bottom Line
Treat AI as an off-ramp from repetitive labor and institutional gatekeeping, redirecting human effort toward genuine connection and creative strategy while accepting that current resistance to the technology is a temporary phase that will fade as AI becomes normalized.
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