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From Archive to AI: Rebuilding Coca-Cola’s Sundblom Santa for Create Real Magic 2024
- Mimic Minds
- 7 days ago
- 5 min read
For Coca-Cola’s 2024 holiday campaign, we reimagined one of the world’s most iconic characters for the age of AI.
We developed a 3D digital twin of the legendary Sundblom Santa - evolving a timeless illustration into a fully interactive, living presence. As part of the Create Real Magic 2024 global campaign, audiences could speak with Santa in real time and transform their own holiday memories into personalized, shareable snow globes.
This project represents a fundamental shift - from static brand heritage to dynamic, conversational experiences - where iconic characters no longer just exist, but actively engage.
Project Snapshot
Released in December 2024, Create Real Magic was Coca-Cola’s global Christmas campaign, bringing AI-driven storytelling to audiences worldwide. The experience reached an international audience through both digital platforms and high-profile public activations worldwide, including Piccadilly Lights, and supported interactions in more than 45 languages.
Commissioned by The Coca-Cola Company, the project sits at the intersection of AI, digital humans and immersive brand experience. The broader collaboration included major technology and creative partners such as Accenture, Microsoft, OpenAI, Leonardo.Ai, alongside Universal Music.
Field | Content |
Release | December 2024 |
Campaign | Create Real Magic 2024 Christmas campaign |
Reach | Global experience, with public activations including Piccadilly Lights |
Languages | 45+ languages, final wording TBC |
Client | The Coca-Cola Company |
Broader Partner Ecosystem | Accenture, Microsoft, OpenAI, Leonardo.Ai, Universal Production Music confirm |
Categories | AI, 3D Digital Human, Brand Experience, Holiday Campaign |
Overview
Create Real Magic 2024 reimagined Coca-Cola’s holiday storytelling as a live, personalized AI experience. Rather than simply showing Santa in a film or static campaign asset, the project invited people to talk directly with him, share a cherished holiday memory, and receive a unique animated snow globe in return.
The ambition was not just to use AI for spectacle. It was to make one of the most recognizable figures in brand history feel warm, responsive, and emotionally relevant in the present. That required a version of Santa who could hold up both as a beloved archival character and as a believable digital presence across web, mobile, and large-scale public experiences.
From the Archives to AI
At the center of the project was the challenge of translating Haddon Sundblom’s classic Santa into a modern AI-native experience without losing the emotional familiarity that made him iconic in the first place.
The idea was powerful in its simplicity. Start with the Santa people already know and trust. Preserve the signature warmth, silhouette, facial character, and nostalgic appeal. Then evolve that figure into a multimodal digital experience that could listen, respond, and help generate highly personal holiday moments at scale.
This was a rare creative brief where character fidelity mattered just as much as technical innovation. The digital Santa could not feel generic, overly synthetic, or detached from the original artwork. He needed to feel recognizably Coca-Cola, while also being ready for conversation, close-up interaction, and content generation.
Campaign Experience
Users could access the experience through CreateRealMagic.com or by scanning QR codes on holiday Coca-Cola packaging. Once inside, they were invited into a real-time conversation with Santa, where they could share a favorite festive memory, a meaningful place, or a personal holiday story.
That conversation became the starting point for a personalized snow globe, generated as a custom visual keepsake that users could share with friends and family. The experience extended beyond the browser in selected public activations, including the immersive Piccadilly Lights execution, where AI-driven interaction and 3D snow-globe storytelling appeared on one of the world’s most visible outdoor screens.
This combination of conversational AI, visual generation, brand nostalgia and public spectacle helped turn a familiar seasonal icon into something participatory, social, and memorable.
Collaboration Across the Partner Ecosystem
A multi-disciplinary production that unified brand, creative, conversational AI, visual generation, music and media activation into a seamless, end-to-end experience.
At its core, the system combined archival storytelling with multilingual speech and language capabilities, generative image workflows, and interactive distribution across both digital platforms and large-scale public installations.
Within this ecosystem, our role was precise but critical: to create the character asset that made the entire experience emotionally credible. The success of the interaction depended on one thing - authenticity. If Santa didn’t feel real, the illusion would collapse instantly.
The digital twin therefore had to do more than look accurate. It needed to preserve heritage, perform convincingly in real time, and remain robust enough for deployment across multiple formats and touchpoints.
Mimic Contribution
Mimic Productions created the 3D Digital Twin of the iconic Sundblom Santa, forming the visual character foundation for the Create Real Magic experience.
Our contribution focused on translating an archival, illustration-based icon into a high-fidelity 3D character that could retain the warmth, recognizability, and brand equity of the original while functioning inside a contemporary AI pipeline. This included the character’s core digital representation, look development, surfacing detail, and production support needed to prepare the asset for downstream use.
A key part of this process was preparing the character for AI workflows - ensuring compatibility with real-time conversational systems, generative content pipelines, and scalable deployment environments. The asset needed to be clean, structured, and adaptable, enabling consistent performance across multiple AI-driven touchpoints without compromising visual fidelity or character integrity.
Because the character had to function across conversational experiences, generated content workflows, and high-visibility public outputs, it needed to balance nostalgia with realism. The result was a digital Santa that feels faithful to the original source material, expressive in motion, and robust enough for modern, multimodal deployment.
Shaping the Future of Brand Experiences
Create Real Magic 2024 demonstrates how brand heritage and AI can reinforce each other rather than compete. Instead of replacing legacy storytelling, the technology extends it - transforming a historic character into a living interface for interaction, personalization and memory-making.
This shift is significant. It signals a move from one-way brand communication to continuous, two-way engagement - where audiences don’t just consume content, but interact with it. In this model, characters evolve from visual assets into intelligent interfaces that carry narrative, emotion, and brand identity across platforms and touchpoints.
For Mimic Minds, the project highlights the strategic value of deep digital-human expertise. It points toward a future where iconic characters, brand mascots, assistants, and embodied AI agents become increasingly conversational, personal, and emotionally resonant - while remaining grounded in premium character craft.
Watch & Behind-the-Scenes
See how an iconic character moved from historical artwork to a conversational AI experience, powered by a cross-functional partner ecosystem and built for global holiday engagement.
Credits
Client: The Coca-Cola Company
Campaign: Create Real Magic 2024
Mimic Productions Role: 3D Digital Twin of Sundblom Santa
Publicly Named Technology and Creative Partners: Accenture, Microsoft, OpenAI, Leonardo.Ai, Mimic Productions, Universal Music
Where Brand Identity Meets Intelligent Characters
From global brand icons to next-generation AI agents, we transform your favourite characters into believable, interactive digital experiences. Whether you’re evolving brand storytelling, redefining customer engagement, or deploying embodied AI at scale, we help you create experiences that connect, perform, and maintain their identity across platforms.
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