How to stop worrying and learn to love AI, according to the team behind Coca-Cola’s ‘Masterpiece'

After decades in advertising, Ajab Samrai, Global CCO of Blitzworks, has seen it all and won it all, with over 300 awards to his name. D&AD caught him in a quiet moment to chat. “I’ve just moved out to the Malvern Hills, right out in the countryside,” he tells us. “It’s quite remote — a different vibe from living in London for 35 years.” When we spoke with Samrai, and his fellow Yellow Pencil-winner, VFX Lead Artist Ryan Knowles, they had yet to congratulate one another in person. “I’ve been in Menorca,” Knowles said, “watching on with a bit of FOMO!”

Of all the awards that Samrai has collected over his career, this one was particularly novel — it was his first for a campaign that had been part-guided by artificial intelligence. Masterpiece, the latest global campaign for The Coca-Cola Company, is a romp of a two-minute film, showcasing the multiple worlds contained inside the artworks lining a gallery wall. Directed by Henry Scholfield, and with VFX from Knowles’ production house, Electric Theatre Collective, it’s a campaign that has been grabbing headlines way in advance of its market releases. “It’s only out in South America and a bit of North America,” Samrai says, “we’ve still got Europe to come. People will be talking about it for the rest of the year.”

The initial concept came from Samrai, drawing upon his experiences as an art college student, sketching the masters from an easel in the centre of the gallery halls. “When we wrote the pitch, we wanted to make it about a feeling we can all empathise with,” he says. “The afternoon slump. You know, when it’s three, four o’clock and you need a pick-me-up to bring you back to life.” In the film, the pick-me-up idea turns literal, with the iconic Coke bottle serving as a baton that is passed from artwork to artwork, with the viewer following its journey.

“Henry [the director’s] work always has that kind of kinetic flow to it,” Knowles says, “so that informed the way we looked at it. We wanted it to have a visceral, roller-coaster effect to it.” As such, the Coke bottle flits in and out of different worlds; worlds that Samrai painstakingly co-ordinated. “We went through tens of thousands of artworks to curate the right set,” he says. “Turner, Van Gogh, Hiroshige, Munch — the whole world of commercial art.” And it was Knowles’ team that was tasked with rendering those worlds in a way that was true to the original artists, creating the feel of stepping inside them for a moment. “These guys worked on capturing every brushstroke,” Samrai says of the Electric Theatre crew. “So much went into making it authentic.”

To get their vignettes as true to each artist as possible, Knowles and his team experimented with every tool at their disposal — but early in production, they discovered that new technologies could transform their way of working. “We used tools like GANs [generative adversarial networks] and Stable Diffusion to really speed up the animation process, and to help us nail the style and texture of things.” They experimented as much as possible with this AI software, using it to, in Knowles’ words, “push the film as far as it could go”, and collaging it with all manner of pre-existing composition techniques.

Samrai was immediately taken aback by the effects. “The techniques that Ryan and his team employ are extraordinary,” he gushes. “This is a combination of new technology and old technology working in harmony.” Knowles agrees; for him, even though it was working at the cutting edge of the industry, doing so with fresh eyes almost felt old school for him and his team. “It was like the year 2000 all over again, scratching our heads trying to harness this new technology. It was very, very exciting.”

By the end of production, Knowles’ team had found countless new uses for artificial intelligence, and woven them into the fabric of the film. “I’d say about 60-80% of all the vignettes in the campaign had some touch of AI used on them. Take the Van Gogh one — that was a total hail mary experiment, which we were able to generate and refine.” Both Knowles and Samrai were keen to stress the term ‘refine’, as it’s the near-absence of refinement that is the hardest thing to navigate with AI at the moment.

“These tools don’t lend themselves to precision, most of the time,” Knowles says, “they’re often about brute force. They have a level of chaos about them.” For Samrai, the biggest risk that AI poses in the here and now is that agencies and creatives don’t get around to smoothing out that chaos, and refining AI-generated products into something more skillful and substantial. “We’re going to go through phases as these tools come out: Midjourney, ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion,” he says. “There’ll be a lot of chewing gum for the eyes, as I call it — sexy looking stuff that doesn’t really mean anything. But you still need creatives who know the art of selling.”

More than this, Samrai says, people are — at the moment at least — taking the wrong message away from the use of AI in this campaign. “There’s conspiracy theories going on around it,” he says, “people thinking that it’s all AI-generated from the first second to the last. I even had to tell Reuters, the news agency, that this isn’t the case.” Knowles acknowledges, however, that the speed in which AI can move through certain tasks will end up transforming the industry, and the lives of the team around him. “Maybe some jobs will kind of fall a bit by the wayside,” he concedes, “but hopefully, there'll be new kinds of roles that emerge in their place.”

Samrai speaks with the calmness of an industry veteran, but to him, it’s clear as day: AI is a paradigm shift that is going to turn advertising on its head. “I came from the old era,” he says, “layout pads and marker pens. When laptops came along, I was a naysayer. I thought they’d make things more difficult.” When he saw the difference they could make, he relented — a change he saw many of his colleagues ignore, he says, to their detriment. “My advice to any creative, young or old, is to embrace it. Embrace it now and learn, because the future is humans and machines working together.”