Every December, the advertising industry reenacts its own version of the Nativity: wise men bearing moodboards, shepherds herding focus groups, and a miraculous birth of a Christmas advert that must, at all costs, look expensive.

This year, two babies arrived. One was swaddled in emotional warmth and human craft. The other appeared to have been delivered by a drunk photocopier.

According to FT The public loved both.

Let us begin with Coca-Cola. For the second consecutive year, they generated their Christmas campaign using artificial intelligence. The ad contains continuity errors worthy of a hallucinating cinematographer. The wheels on the truck appear and vanish. Animals morph between art styles like Pokémon evolving out of boredom. The whole thing looks like a mashup of a Christmas fever dream and a GPU having a nervous breakdown. I hated it!

Critics hated it. The internet howled. The profession clutched its pearls.

Consumers, however, reacted as they always do to Coca-Cola at Christmas. They felt nostalgic. They felt warm. They felt thirsty.

John Lewis, by contrast, crafted a lovely, touching father and son story. Proper actors. Careful storytelling. A script written by someone who drinks tea slowly and wears jumpers. Critics swooned. Commentators debated masculinity and modern fatherhood.

Consumers liked it roughly as much as the AI chaos.

If this does not make you slightly uneasy as a creative professional, check your pulse.

The uncomfortable truth is that, for large parts of the population, Christmas advertising is not a creative competition. It is a memory activation ritual. You are not creating meaning so much as triggering it.

This helps explain the most sacrilegious finding of all. When tested at scale, the AI Coca-Cola ad achieved maximum scores for short and long-term commercial effectiveness. Not high. Not excellent. Maximum.

In other words, the glitchy one did the job just as well as the beautifully made one.

This leads us to a few observations that the industry will, quite understandably, discuss only in hushed tones.

First: effectiveness has quietly divorced itself from craftsmanship. Not entirely, but enough that the relationship looks like a polite open marriage. For many brands, emotional association matters more than cinematic perfection.

Second: AI will not replace creativity, but it may replace indifference to inconsistencies. People do not sit at home with clipboards noting frame-to-frame truck design. They are simply asking themselves, however subconsciously, “Does this make me feel something familiar?”

Third: nostalgia is becoming unfairly powerful. Coca-Cola has a seasonal monopoly that AI can exploit with minimal risk. A warm feeling is already baked into the memory. The AI is simply pressing the button. Smaller brands cannot play this game. Their nostalgia cupboard is empty.

So the question is not whether AI will replace creatives. The question is whether the economic incentives now favor AI for everything except the small number of genuinely original ideas humans must still generate.

The craft will matter, but only when originality matters. For seasonal advertising with decades of emotional equity, originality is not the goal. Memory is.

This is not a creative armageddon. It is more like the invention of the calculator. Those who insisted on long division as a personality trait lost out. Those who used calculators to solve more interesting problems progressed.

AI will not kill creativity. It may, however, kill laziness disguised as craftsmanship.

This should be good news. If routine content creation becomes a commodity, human intelligence can be redeployed where it is irreplaceable: original ideas, fresh provocations, and counterintuitive leaps that machines cannot yet take.

In other words, the future will belong to the people who understand what creativity is for. Not those who believe it is a decorative art movement, but those who see it as a problem-solving tool for irrational humans.

If an imperfect AI Coca-Cola advert can outperform a perfectly made one, the message is clear.

We were never in the business of perfection.
We were in the business of persuasion.
The machines have merely reminded us.