What happened

Coca-Cola’s “Classic” campaign, produced by VML New York and WPP Open X, used AI to scan books for references to Coca-Cola, aiming to celebrate the brand’s literary legacy. 

The ad featured what it claimed was a quote from a 1967 book titled “Extreme Metaphors by J.G. Ballard.” However, no such book exists. 

However, the text actually came from a 2012 posthumous collection of interviews, “Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with J.G. Ballard 1967–2008,” and the specific words were not Ballard’s prose but a translation of a spoken interview, written by the book’s editor, Dan O’Hara. 

The ad also included errors such as misspelling “Shanghai,” Ballard’s birthplace. 

It was called out for misrepresenting Ballard's work and undermining the integrity of literary references, the agency's apparently slapdash oversight of its use of AI, and the reliability of WPP Open.

Why it happened

The error arose from the campaign’s reliance on AI to identify literary mentions of Coca-Cola, followed by insufficient human editorial oversight. 

While the agency claimed that a manual review was conducted, the process - assuming it indeed took place - failed to catch the misattribution and factual inaccuracies. 

The campaign’s automation led to the creation of a fictional book and the presentation of interview transcripts as original Ballard writing.