Graft for craft: Why pain will always inspire the best creativity

I saw the Coke Christmas ad on Sky Sports last night. It wasn’t even the new Lion King-inspired, gathering-of-the-animals iteration, it was last year’s rendition with ‘people’.

It made me shudder. Not because of the expressive vacuum of uncanny valley. But because the average punter won’t notice that it’s AI. Or care, according to marketing research company System1. 

While marketers yearn for effectiveness, creatives pine after craft.

If the message lands, who cares how it was made, right? I’d argue the ad maintains effectiveness not due to the visuals but thanks to the musical jingle and the decades-old memory structures strong enough to paper over the wildest of hallucinations. But perhaps that’s beside the point.

While marketers yearn for effectiveness, creatives pine after craft. And this polarisation only deepens with the superficial ease of AI.

Above: Coca-Cola's AI-generated 2024 Christmas spot is scary, says Chang, because he average viewer won't know or care that it's AI. 

Now, McDonald’s is the latest superbrand to take the plunge with an AI-prompted Christmas ad. It’s a horribly chaotic hurricane of minced megabytes, ironically decrying “the most terrible time of year”, which will send you running for the comments, chicken nuggets at the ready. The backlash was scathing – and the ad promptly axed.

When reality becomes debatable, things do start to get existential.

What’s strange about the McDonald’s attempt is it looks like a leap backwards in visual quality, to the bygone months of Midjourney V5. In other words, it doesn’t take a trained eye to realise it’s not real. But what happens when we inevitably can’t tell the difference? With the likes of Nano Banana Pro and ElevenLabs pushing the limits of what generated content can look and sound like, who and what do we believe in a post-truth universe? 

Loss of mastery

This is not a tirade against AI. However, when reality becomes debatable, things do start to get existential. Maybe, just maybe, people will find joy and satisfaction in going back to basics – a kind of comforting creative truth – both by way of creating, but also through what we choose to consume.

Call it highbrow, but the way things are going, human creation could become just that. Perhaps ‘high fidelity’ creativity is about seeking truthfulness in what we make. Against a hollowed-out simulacrum of the world around us, craft will become brand, where brand is the craft. And the most masterful companies will play here.

Above: The traditional techniques used in Intermarché’s 2025 Christmas spot make it a stand-out piece of work. 

The clapback has begun. There are obvious statements, like Intermarché’s meticulous live-action/animation hybrid Christmas fairytale about a wolf who has a change of diet. "Let’s be honest, shooting in 40°C heat, in a Christmas setting, with a five-year-old child who had never acted before… that was quite a challenge! I loved it," director Nadège Loiseau said.

Apple TV’s painstaking process to shoot its new ident, frame-by-frame, shunned synthetic production. But also, outside of adland, the sight of polyglot sports journalist Alex Aljoe, who translates herself on live broadcast to interview football players in their native tongue, somehow feels like a display of soft human power. It’s like watching Google Translate in real time. Except from a human. Not to get political, but what can we decipher from Zohran Mamdani's election-winning, hand-painted design identity? None of these took the easy route.

Enter Rosalía

“This is maximalism,” says Rosalía of her shape-shifting operatic opus album LUX , featuring no less than 13 languages and the classical sounds of the London Symphony Orchestra. “Instead of A to B. Boom… go through the experience,” she told Zane Lowe.

The pursuit of excellence never existed as a shortcut. It wasn’t ever meant to be painless. Like a violinist practicing scales and arpeggios, over and over. She goes on to extol the virtues of using acoustic instruments and avoiding digital loops. This artistic choice becomes a statement of intent. “It’s wood, metallic… the physicality… it’s made by a human.”

As we all know, we get some of the best ballads of our time only when Adele is healing. Some would say Lily Allen is in a similar sphere. Written in 10 days, her revenge album West End Girl is further proof that pain is a fantastic stimulus for creation, capturing the anti-romance zeitgeist of today’s millennials.