Create Real Magic: the brand archive was the brief

Case study · Marketing 475 · Building Your Brand’s Visual Voice with AI

Coca-Cola let thousands of people make AI art with its brand, and the work stayed recognizably Coke because the company handed over its real assets instead of describing them.

The situation

In early 2023, generative image tools were new to most marketers. Anyone could type a prompt into DALL-E and get a picture. The problem for brands was obvious: type “a cola bottle in a snowy forest” and you get a generic bottle, not yours.

Coca-Cola has one of the deepest visual archives in marketing. The contour bottle, the Spencerian script logo, its Santa Claus and its Polar Bear have been used for decades. On March 20, 2023, the company launched Create Real Magic, a platform built with Bain & Company and OpenAI that combined GPT-4 and DALL-E.

The challenge

Coca-Cola wanted the energy of open co-creation without losing control of what its brand looks like. If creators described the brand in their own words, the AI would fill the gaps with its own guesses. The results could look like any soda, or like nothing at all.

The company also needed the work to be good enough to run in public. Winning entries were promised a spot on Coca-Cola’s digital billboards in Times Square in New York and Piccadilly Circus in London.

What they did

Instead of a written brand description, Coca-Cola gave creators the real thing. According to the company’s March 2023 announcement, users could work with dozens of branded elements from its archives, including the contour bottle, the Spencerian script, the Coca-Cola Santa Claus and the Polar Bear.

Creators combined those assets with their own prompts, then downloaded and submitted the results. Coca-Cola also commissioned four AI artists to make the first pieces so participants could see what was possible.

• Open in 17 countries, with submissions closing March 31, 2023, about 11 days after launch (MediaPost, 2023).
• Prize: a chance to appear on digital billboards in New York and London.
• Thirty creators were invited to a three-day Real Magic Creative Academy at Coca-Cola’s Atlanta headquarters, run with OpenAI, where they would co-create work for possible merchandise and digital collectibles and be credited for it.
• In December 2023, Coca-Cola extended the idea to the holidays, letting people make AI Christmas cards from its festive archive.

What happened

The platform drew a large, global response. Fast Company, naming Coca-Cola one of its Most Innovative Companies of 2024, reported the results.

• More than 120,000 artworks created by participants in 17 countries (Fast Company, 2024).
• About 300 million social media impressions (Fast Company, 2024).
• The company reused the platform for a holiday version later in 2023 (AdNews, 2023).

Why it worked

The assets did the brand work. A creator could put a polar bear on the moon or turn the bottle into a stained-glass window, and the result still read as Coca-Cola, because the bottle shape and the script came from the archive, not from the AI’s guess.

This is the difference between describing a brand and supplying it. A description such as “classic red cola bottle” leaves room for the model to invent. A real logo file or the real bottle silhouette removes that room. Coca-Cola set the frame, and creators played inside it.

Where it gets complicated

This approach depends on having strong, well-known assets in the first place. Coca-Cola has spent decades building them. A young brand with an inconsistent identity has less to hand over, and the same platform would produce weaker results.

Volume is not the same as quality. More than 120,000 pieces were made, but only a small number could ever be chosen for the billboards. Someone still had to review, select and approve the work. AI scaled the making. It did not replace human judgment about what was good enough to carry the brand.

Co-creation also raises ownership questions. Coca-Cola addressed some of this by promising credit to Academy participants. Any brand copying the model needs clear rules on who owns, credits and can reuse what people make.

The marketing principle

Visual AI is only as on-brand as what you feed it. Give it your exact logo files, colors, typefaces and reference images, not loose adjectives. Coca-Cola’s archive acted as the creative brief, and that is why wildly different pieces still looked like one brand.

Sources

• Coca-Cola Invites Digital Artists to ‘Create Real Magic’ Using New AI Platform, The Coca-Cola Company (2023)
• Coca-Cola Creates AI Platform That Lets People Use Its Visual Assets To Create Works Of Art, MediaPost (2023)
• Coca-Cola: Most Innovative Companies 2024, Fast Company (2024)
• Coca-Cola unveils AI tool to deliver festive magic, AdNews (2023)

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