Shoot the real plate

Listen to this episode of Social Media Train Wrecks, then use the piece below.

A bagel shop in Austin made an AI weather graphic for Austin City Limits, a mud forecast, the kind of festival joke a small shop posts on a Thursday and forgets by Friday. It reached more than 600,000 people. Their posts usually reach about 200. Almost none of that reach was friendly, and some of it showed up as threatening DMs. Nobody deserves a threat over a bagel post, and I'm not here to pile on a shop owner fighting rising costs. I want to talk about who trained that crowd. The answer is a red truck.

What happened in Austin

MySA reported on October 8 that two Austin spots posted the same kind of statement on Instagram, a day apart. El Pollo Rico, the smoked chicken chain, said it would "discontinue the use of AI-generated imagery in our social media content," admitted some of its designs hadn't met customer expectations, and thanked people for their honesty. That statement drew nearly 5,000 likes. David Doughies Bagelry followed the next day, after the ACL post. The owner's line was blunt: AI sucks, but that "doesn't give people a reason to suck too."

Two different outcomes from the same mistake. The chicken place apologized in plain words and the crowd turned into fans. The bagel shop got the pile-on first.

The crowd Coke warmed up

Go back to November 2024. Coca-Cola remade "Holidays Are Coming," the 1995 spot with the glowing trucks rolling through a snowy town. For a lot of people that ad is the starting gun for Christmas. Coke rebuilt it with generative AI through three studios, Secret Level, Silverside AI and Wild Card. People noticed the uncanny faces and the wheels that didn't turn like wheels. One post of the ad on X passed 56 million views, and Alex Hirsch, who created Gravity Falls, wrote that Coke is red because it's made from the blood of out-of-work artists. When the best joke in the room is about you, you're the punchline for a year.

Here's the fair part, and I mean it. System1 scored that 2024 spot a 5.9 in both the US and the UK, the top of its scale, and called the response overwhelmingly positive. On a TV between two football plays, the trucks and the jingle still work. The ad did its job as an ad.

Then Coke went again. On November 3, 2025, it released a new AI version, this time from Silverside and Secret Level, and somebody clearly read last year's notes about faces: almost no humans. Polar bears, seals, rabbits, puppies, a sloth or two. The wheels spin correctly now. They fixed the thing they thought people were mad about.

The conversation about the brand told a different story. CARMA, the media monitoring firm, tracked it: before the ad, 23.8 percent of the conversation about Coke was positive. After launch, 10.2 percent. Negative barely moved, 31.4 to 32. The critics didn't grow. The fans went quiet. That's the number I'd lose sleep over, because an angry person is loud for a week and a fan who stops defending you is gone a lot longer.

The bonehead move was the talking

Using AI was a business call, and in my opinion it's Coke's call to make. The wreck is how they talked about it.

The production story went public right alongside the ad. Silverside said five AI specialists generated and refined 70,000 raw clips and the schedule dropped to about 30 days, against roughly a year for a pre-AI Coke holiday spot. That's a great slide for an earnings call. Investors hear fast and cheap and they clap. Customers hear fast and cheap and think about their cousin who does animation and just lost a contract. Same sentence, two audiences, opposite reactions, and Coke handed the investor version to the customer.

Then Pratik Thakar, Coke's global VP and head of generative AI, told The Hollywood Reporter that last year's critics went after the craftsmanship and this year's craftsmanship is far better. And the line everybody screenshotted: "The genie is out of the bottle, and you're not going to put it back in." Maybe he's right about the industry. It doesn't matter. When a customer says I'm upset and the brand answers you can't stop this, the brand has stopped talking to a customer and started arguing with one.

My grades. Keeping the ad on air gets a B; the testing backed it, and pulling a holiday spot because the comments got rough would have been its own mistake. The talking gets a D. They heard a values complaint and answered it with a production report (better wheels, more clips, fewer specialists, higher scores). Every answer was true, and every answer was about Coke.

The painful part is that the fix was already in the campaign. Coke also ran a traditionally made spot that season, "A Holiday Memory," a woman, a snow globe, a party she remembers, played by people with faces. Lead the season with that one, let the trucks ride along, and half the fight never starts.

Coke survives this. Coke survives everything; it has enough goodwill banked to lose some and keep selling. That's the trap for everybody else. A small brand watches Coke shrug it off and decides it was fine. It wasn't fine for Coke. Coke just has the cushion. Two years of those headlines taught people to scan every food image for AI and go after it, and a bagel shop in Austin walked straight into the crowd Coke spent two Christmases warming up.

What to do before your holiday posts go up

Holiday content starts landing in about three weeks; Coke dropped last year's on November 3. Most of you are building the calendar right now. Four rules for the playbook, then the three things you can ship today.

Read last year's comments before you repeat anything. A person, not a dashboard, reads them and writes one sentence on top of the next brief: what were they mad about. Sort into two piles. A quality complaint, you fix the wheels. A values complaint, you can't fix with better rendering; you fix it by showing who made the thing. Coke's pile was mostly values, and they spent a year on the wheels.

Ban the genie sentence. Inevitable, can't stop progress, deal with it. Any line that tells customers they've lost doesn't ship on a brand account. Put it in writing so the next exec interview gets checked against it.

Build a wall between the two stories. Fast and cheap belongs in the trade press and the earnings call. The brand feed gets who made this and why it's for you. Nobody posts the CFO version on Instagram.

Your food photo is a promise. If the plate on the table doesn't look like the plate in the post, you lied to the customer, and AI makes that lie very easy to tell. Use AI wherever you like behind the scenes; never make the tool the hero of a food post.

One, pasteable copy (if you already posted AI food imagery)

Do what El Pollo Rico did: say it plainly, say you're stopping, say why, and don't argue in the comments. Swap in your details:

We used AI to make some of the food images on this account. That wasn't fair to you, because the plate you get should look like the plate you saw. Starting today, every food photo here is our own food, shot in our kitchen on a phone. Thanks to everyone who told us straight.

No "if anyone was offended," no discount, no defense of the tool. Pin it for a week. Reply to the angry ones with one line ("You were right, we changed it") and leave the threads alone after that.

If you haven't posted any AI food imagery, use this instead, any day this month:

Every photo on this account is our food, shot in our kitchen on a phone, usually by whoever's on the line that day. If it looks a little rough, that's why.

Two, the still

Shoot the actual plate on the actual pass, right as it goes out. Phone, 1x lens, eye level with the counter, whatever light the kitchen has. Leave the paper towel in the corner and the ticket rail in the background. Somebody's hand sliding the plate forward is fine; no staged garnish, no editing beyond a crop. Post it with the second caption above. It will beat a perfect render because people can tell it came out of a kitchen in half a second.

Three, a 20-second video, shot today

Vertical, one phone, no music bed, no text animation. Shot one, three seconds: the ticket printing. Shot two, four seconds: hands plating, tight, no faces needed. Shot three, four seconds: the phone in somebody's hand taking the picture of the plate, over their shoulder. Shot four, four seconds: that same photo on the phone screen held next to the plate, both in frame. Shot five, five seconds: whoever cooked it, to camera, one sentence: "That's the plate, and that's the picture." Caption: "Same plate. Same day. No AI." Then stop.

This piece is the extension of this morning's Social Media Train Wrecks. The show is the briefing, the article is the build, and the post is what you ship. It runs every Thursday in The Daily Trend Report feed; subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and it's waiting before you open the laptop.

If your feed is full of stock shots, renders, or photos that could belong to anybody, that's what I fix for food and beverage brands: short-form video and photography of your actual product, made by people who've held it. Message me on LinkedIn.