AI-generated video was everywhere in 2025, but the public response suggests people still aren't here for it. While a French supermarket became a global household name for using real animation, the Coca-Cola Christmas advert and McDonald's Christmas advert got roasted like chestnuts on an open fire.
It seems AI still can't generate the emotion of the best Christmas adverts, but one creative agency decided to test it for themselves. They used a raft of tools to try to create a holiday tearjerker entirely using AI, from the concept to the location scouting, production and colour grading.
The result ended up being a demonstration of the agency's belief that AI can't replace human-led production – and it generated some hilarious bloopers along the way.
The Canadian agency Wunder says it created its AI holiday spot as a response to that Coca-Cola ad and as a commentary on the state of AI in the creative sector.
Two of its humans, Mike Postma and Stephen Flynn, fed Chat GPT classic Christmas ads like Apple’s Misunderstood, Amazon’s Joy Ride and the entire John Lewis collection. The chatbot then 'pitched' concepts and scripts, and the pair settled on The Train.
They used a raft of AI tools in the process: ChatGPT for script and creative, Augment Code for casting and wardrobe, Qwen Image for location scouting, Nano Banana for photography, Google Flow (Veo 3.1) for video production, Imagen AI for colour grading and Eleven Labs for music and sound effects.
The bloopers reel below includes a series of unintentionally comical AI hallucinations and inconsistencies generated in the production part of the process, including some serious problems coping with the logic of doors and telephones.
“After about a week of production, we had all of the pieces that should result in a holiday ad that really gets people in the feels. The only thing missing was the magic of a human being involved at any point in the process,” Wunder says.
The spot concludes by extending Coca-Cola's now dubious tagline: 'Real magic, requires real people'.
Wunder describes itself as an agency that “really values the big idea and believes that AI is killing creativity and could never come close to the types of ideas that humans are able to conceive.” What do you think? With another year, could generative AI make a classic holiday ad that tugs at the heartstrings, or will it never have the human touch?
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