The Day Coca-Cola Ran Out of Magic

By: Paco Campbell
Published: Friday, December 12th, 2025

There’s a shot in The Santa Clause — the first one, the only one that actually mattered — where Tim Allen’s character arrives at the North Pole for the first time. The whole place glows like someone built Christmas out of warm circuits. It doesn’t look real; it looks right. It feels like December got tired of waiting for us and showed up anyway.

That’s what Coke ads used to do.
They didn’t depict Christmas.
They conjured it.

Coca-Cola built an emotional operating system that ran under all our Decembers:

The trucks.
The music.
The polar bears who looked more emotionally literate than most adults in boardrooms.

And somewhere between the jingle and the glow, Coke taught us what wonder felt like.

This year, again, wonder didn’t show up.

The Axles of the Apocalypse

At first, nothing looks wrong. Snow. Lights. Red trucks rolling through villages that have the architectural DNA of a Hallmark fever dream.

Then the wheels begin to… multiply.

Three axles. Five. A sudden outbreak of wheels spreading across the truck chassis like a physics bug in Need for Speed the day before launch.

It’s not horrifying.
It’s not even bad.
It’s just empty.

You’re watching a commercial trying to remember what trucks look like the same way AI tries to remember what hands look like.

And that emptiness carries weight.
You feel it in your chest before you feel it in your eyes.

Because an axle doesn’t matter.
This isn’t an AI failure.
It’s what happens when speaking up exists only as theater.

The Accountant and the Adorable Eyes

My husband — a man who experiences the world as rows and columns of solvable problems he loves — watched the ad and smiled.

“It’s so cute.” He sees animation and big eyes. He’s the control group.

For someone without an emotional lineage with Coca-Cola, the ad works exactly as intended.

I see a broken covenant.

If Coke is just a beverage — just another December commercial — then nothing to see here. Move along.

But if you remember the polar bears gazing at the aurora like they were witnessing God’s first draft…
If you remember holding a bottle with your name on it and the tiny thrill of being seen by something mass-produced…
If you remember “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” and how, for a split second, peace on Earth didn’t feel like satire… but achievable?

Then this new ad hits like the studio recast Santa and hoped you wouldn’t notice.

Cute isn’t the problem.

Cute used to be the floor.
Now it’s the goal.

The Brand That Once Built Universes

Coke didn’t market beverages. Coke built myth.

They made universes inside vending machines — entire ecosystems of whimsy jammed into thirty seconds of screen time.
They made personalization mainstream by printing your name on a bottle and letting you feel chosen.
They turned polar bears into spiritual guides with better cinematography than most nature documentaries from the 90s.

Coke ads were the emotional highlight reel of humanity.

Aliens could land, watch the Coke canon, and leave convinced we were a species worth rooting for.

This year?

They’d assume we had been replaced by our own render farm.

When Magic Becomes a Line Item

The tragedy isn’t that the ad uses AI.
AI is a tool. A brush. A lens. It can be beautiful when used by someone who has something to say.

The tragedy is that Coke used AI the way people use CliffsNotes: to avoid doing the work.

Executives are apparently thrilled.
Not because the ad is great.
Because it is cheap.

The internal celebration isn’t about storyboards or cinematography or emotional resonance.

It’s about cost savings.

When artists lose budgets, the magic leaks out through the floorboards.
When brands lose conviction, the soul evaporates.

And that’s what I’m feeling.
Not anger.
Not outrage.

Grief.

Meanwhile, Apple Still Believes in Glass

Apple — of all companies — offered the counterexample.

They could have prompted Sora for a new AppleTV intro and gotten something slick, flashy, algorithmically validated by a pretend focus group that doesn’t exist.

Instead, they built it out of real glass.
Real reflections.
Real hands adjusting real light.

Five seconds of beauty created by people who remembered that even the smallest rituals deserve intention.

This wasn’t nostalgia.
Their DNA still flinches when art is treated as optional.

The Quiet Violence of Indifference

When you have a lifelong emotional relationship with a brand, you don’t realize how much trust you’re carrying until something knocks it loose.

Coke was never about the drink.
Coke was the feeling around the drink.

Magic as a deliverable.
Wholesomeness as a product line.
Emotion packaged in red and white and an orchestral swell.

Wake it up, wake up the happiness.

This year they didn’t just miss.
They didn’t try.

And it turns out that’s the deepest betrayal: not malice.
Indifference.

Because you can’t automate heart.
You can’t outsource warmth.

Magic requires fingerprints. Not prompts.

The Last Sip

I love Mexican Cokes in glass bottles.

They are the real thing.
A sip of Coke in those bottles can bring back memories of Christmas at grandma’s house. Or of tacos at 2AM. #IYKYK. It’s a whole range of memories right at that first sip.

This ad doesn’t remember anything.
Not the lore.
Not the craft.
Not the feeling.

Coke once made art for the child in you.

This one was made for the balance sheet.

And maybe that’s why it lingers.

Not because the truck had too many wheels.

But because no one owned the moment enough to count them.