Coca-Cola AI Santa: Rebuilding Sundblom’s Character
Updated: 7 days ago
How can an archival brand character be translated into an AI-era experience without losing its identity?
The Sundblom Santa project sits at the intersection of archive research, character design, digital production and modern interactive media.
This article preserves the existing project account while adding a practical framework for responsible archival character reconstruction, review and deployment.
Table of Contents
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.
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.
Responsible Workflow for an Archival AI Character
An archival character project begins with primary material. Teams should catalogue approved illustrations, photographs, campaign documents and brand guidance, recording the date and source of each reference. This prevents later creative decisions from being mistaken for historical evidence.
Identity design requires more than matching a face. Proportions, costume, color, expression, posture and movement all contribute to recognition. A clear character bible helps artists and technical teams maintain consistency when the character moves from still images into animation or interactive experiences.
Reconstruction inevitably involves interpretation. Archival artwork may show only selected views or poses, so teams must decide how unseen angles, movement and behavior should look. Those decisions should be documented and reviewed rather than presented as if they came directly from the historical source.
Voice and dialogue introduce another layer of responsibility. Teams need permission for any real likeness or voice reference and should avoid implying that newly written lines are archival quotations. Scripts, tone and vocabulary need the same brand and legal review as the visual character.
A production pipeline may combine modeling, texturing, rigging, motion capture, facial animation, voice and real-time systems. Each stage should use approved reference material and pass through visual quality checks. Technical polish matters only when it supports the recognizable character.
Interactive versions need bounded knowledge and behavior. Define what the character can discuss, which sources inform responses and when it should decline or redirect. The experience should not improvise claims about history, products or people beyond approved information.
Disclosure should match the context. Audiences should be able to understand when they are seeing a digital reconstruction, synthesized performance or interactive character. Transparency does not weaken the experience; it helps distinguish creative interpretation from historical documentation.
Finally, plan for preservation. Store source files, approvals, model versions, motion data and final renders with clear ownership and access rules. An archival digital asset has long-term value only when future teams can understand how it was created and what rights govern its reuse.
Practical Decision Summary
Catalogue approved archival sources and preserve their provenance.
Document creative interpretation separately from historical evidence.
Review likeness, voice, dialogue and brand behavior before deployment.
Preserve models, approvals, rights and version history for future use.
Related Mimic Minds Resources
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Coca-Cola AI Santa project about?
It concerns translating the established Sundblom Santa character into a contemporary digital production and experience while preserving recognizable brand qualities.
Why are archival references important?
They give artists and reviewers a documented source for appearance, costume, expression and historical context.
Can an archival illustration become a 3D character directly?
No. Unseen angles, movement and behavior require interpretation, modeling, rigging and review.
How should newly written dialogue be handled?
It should be clearly treated as new creative material, reviewed by the brand and not presented as an archival quotation.
What rights need to be reviewed?
Teams should review artwork, character, likeness, voice, music, campaign and distribution rights for the intended use.
Can an archival character be conversational?
Potentially, with approved knowledge, bounded behavior, moderation and clear escalation or refusal rules.
Should audiences be told the character is digital?
Yes, especially when the experience could reasonably be mistaken for an authentic historical recording or live person.
How should the digital asset be preserved?
Keep source references, production files, approvals, rights records, versions and final deliverables in a maintained archive.
Rights, Review and Future Reuse
Before a reconstructed character appears in a new channel, the team should confirm that the approved rights cover that exact use. A campaign film, interactive installation, social asset and reusable real-time character can involve different permissions. Distribution regions, campaign duration, paid media, merchandise and third-party platforms should be recorded rather than assumed.
Review also needs named decision makers. Brand, legal, archive, creative and technical teams may evaluate different parts of the result, so approval gates should be defined before production. A version should not move forward simply because the model looks convincing if the script, movement, context or rights remain unresolved.
Future reuse should be governed as carefully as the initial launch. New technology can make an existing asset easier to animate or converse with, but that does not automatically authorize new behavior. Every extension should return to the approved character bible, source record and rights framework, with updated disclosure and audience testing for the new context.
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