Coca-Cola: The Fresco

The background

The Olympic Torch Relay of Paris 2024 will be a once-in-a-lifetime event for all French people, watched by the world. As sponsors of the event, Coca-Cola wanted to immortalise the moment that France comes together with an inclusive, unifying art experience. So we created The Coca-Cola Fresco, an AI-driven digital mural that expands and evolves with every new person that joins the celebration.

The execution

Living on the Coca-Cola app, the experience invites users to take a selfie to start the process of generating their own AI avatar. Their image is then blended with carefully moderated mannequins to create a bespoke character primed for national celebration. Once created, avatars are added to a digital mural which users can explore to find themselves, their family and friends.

We combined eight different AI models including Stable Diffusion to create a 15-step process that automatically generates thousands of avatar variations. Our challenge was to create a solid system that could produce multiple results with minimal errors – not just to achieve the perfect face merge, but to generate suitable hairstyles, outfits and even poses – all while adhering to our high visual standards. A variety of customisation options made the experience inclusive to all, with different skin tones and modesty and disability choices for the user ensuring that everyone felt represented.

Art is often used to immortalise historic moments. So for the Fresco’s look and feel, we embraced a classic Renaissance style with a modern twist – complete with paint stroke effects. To emphasise the atmosphere of national pride, we created 14 unique backgrounds for the experience, each focused on landmarks and landscapes from various French regions. We combined these into a single backdrop for the ever-expanding fresco, using Olympics branded drapes to separate each one.

These backdrops were also used to create a series of localised OOH posters to help Coca-Cola promote the campaign across the country.

We learnt a lot about AI over the course of this project – from its strengths and current weaknesses to the best ways to combine different tools. AI isn’t ready to be used ‘straight out the box’ in many production environments. So a bespoke approach is often needed – especially when large output numbers are required. Designing and constantly refining a suitable pipeline for these output requirements is key for success.

The results

Using the power of AI, The Coca-Cola Fresco created a visible and unique connection between French people across all regions, ages, genders and backgrounds, epitomising what it means to stand together and celebrate as a nation. Over the course of the project we:

-Moderated over 1 million output variations
-Generated over 20,000 unique output variations for our final AI library
-Tested on datasets of 1000s selfies
-Integrated over 500 prompts
-And clocked 10,000 GPU hours

The Coca-Cola Fresco is a perfect example of how we can use AI to its greatest effect within advertising – to accelerate our workflows, elevate our craft and drive personalisation at scale. We can’t wait to see where the ever-evolving tech will take us next.