Coca cola: The Fresco
The Coca-Cola fresco OOH experience embodies the vibrant spirit of the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. Across outdoor posters, 14 torchbearers grace the scene, each representing a distinctive region of France. Beyond merely celebrating athletic prowess, our campaign aims to foster unity, celebrating the diversity of every individual. Elevating our creativity to new heights, we've harnessed the power of AI tools to craft designs that captivate and inspire.
Role - Art Director
Establishing Art Direction for the OOH experience
Establishing and onboarding creative team members to the project
Setting a timeline to track client's deadline
Generating AI images
Delivering high quality Key Visuals, graphic materials
Collaborating with Creative Directors, Clients, Project Managers, Producers, 2D designers to establish consistent branding and coordinate production process
Overseeing, reviewing and approving final results
The Execution
Hosted on the Coca-Cola app, the experience invites users to start by taking a selfie, which kicks off the process of generating their own custom AI avatar. Their photo is then seamlessly blended with carefully curated mannequin features to create a personalized character, ready for national celebration. Once the avatar is created, it’s added to a digital mural where users can explore and discover themselves, their friends, and family.
To bring this to life, we integrated eight different AI models, including Midjourney, into a 15-step process that generates thousands of unique avatar variations. Our challenge was to design a robust system that could deliver diverse results with minimal errors—not just perfecting face merges, but also generating appropriate hairstyles, outfits, and poses—all while maintaining our high visual standards. The experience also offered a range of customization options to ensure inclusivity, with choices for skin tones, modesty, and disabilities, so everyone felt represented.
Art has long been used to capture historic moments, and for this digital fresco, we embraced a Renaissance-inspired style with a modern twist, complete with painterly stroke effects. To heighten the sense of national pride, we designed 14 distinct backgrounds, each highlighting iconic landmarks and landscapes from different regions of France. These were then combined into a single expansive backdrop for the ever-growing mural, separated by Olympic-branded drapes.
Throughout the project, we gained invaluable insights into AI—its strengths, current limitations, and the best ways to blend various tools. Off-the-shelf AI isn’t always production-ready, especially for large-scale output. A customized approach was essential to meet the demands of this project, with constant pipeline refinement key to our success.
These unique backdrops also inspired a series of localized OOH posters, which Coca-Cola used to promote the campaign nationwide.
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.
Source: UNIT9
