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The Daily Trend Report. Every weekday morning, giovanni gallucci and a rotating cohost (Chloe Dawn on clean label food and beverage, plus Rachel Donovan or Alexis Parker on social media) synthesize the day's cross-LLM trend reports into three operator stories: social media, clean label food and beverage, and content, social, and AI. Tight, specific, no filler. For owners, founders, marketing leads, and operators in clean-label CPG.
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| ai-assisted content
[INTRO]
[HOST] Welcome to Social Media Train Wrecks. This is the Thursday episode of The Daily Trend Report feed, where we roll up on a food or beverage brand's worst week online and pick through the wreckage. I'm giovanni gallucci, and Chloe Dawn's riding shotgun. Chloe, what are we rubbernecking at?
[GUEST] Two smoking craters in Austin. Then one very big red truck.
[HOST] Start with Austin.
[GUEST] Early this month, two local spots post the same kind of apology on Instagram. El Pollo Rico, the smoked chicken place, says it's done with AI-generated images. David Doughies Bagelry says the same thing a day later. The bagel shop made an AI weather graphic for Austin City Limits. Mud forecast, festival joke. It reached six hundred thousand people. Their normal post reaches about two hundred.
[HOST:surprised] Three thousand times their usual reach, and every bit of it angry.
[GUEST] Angry and worse. Hateful comments. Threatening DMs.
[HOST] Nobody deserves a threat over a bagel post. Period. And we're not here to pile on a guy who's fighting rising costs to keep the lights on. That's a small business that got hit by a wave somebody else built. So I want to go find who built it.
[GUEST] Which is why the truck.
[HOST] Which is why the truck. Holiday ad season starts in about three weeks. And the brand that taught every food and beverage customer in America to check a holiday ad for AI is Coca-Cola. Two years running. Pull us up to the crash site.
[STINGER]
[SECTION 1]
[GUEST] Back up to November of twenty twenty-four. Coke remakes Holidays Are Coming.
[HOST] The 1995 spot. The glowing trucks rolling through a snowy town, the jingle, the whole thing. For a lot of people that ad is the signal that Christmas has officially started.
[GUEST] And they rebuild it with AI. Three AI studios, Secret Level, Silverside, and one called Wild Card.
[HOST] And people tear it apart. Uncanny faces, truck wheels that don't spin the way wheels spin. One post of the ad on X passed fifty-six million views, and the comments were brutal. Alex Hirsch, the guy who created Gravity Falls, posts that Coke is red because it's made from the blood of out-of-work artists.
[GUEST:mischievous] That's a good line. I'm a little mad I didn't write it.
[HOST] It's a great line, and that's the problem. When the best joke in the room is about you, you're the punchline for a year.
[GUEST] So year two. November third, twenty twenty-five. They go again.
[HOST] They go again. Same idea, Holidays Are Coming, built with generative AI, this time from Silverside and Secret Level. And somebody clearly read the notes about the creepy human faces, because this time there are barely any humans.
[GUEST] Animals. So many animals. Seals, rabbits, porcupines, puppies. Meerkats in sweaters. Foxes in peacoats.
[HOST] Polar bears, of course. And for reasons nobody has explained to me, sloths.
[GUEST] So they fixed it.
[HOST] They fixed the thing they thought people were mad about. The wheels spin right now. And that's where this whole story turns, because the craft was never the real complaint.
[GUEST:curious] Then what was the real complaint?
[HOST] Read the comments. One person on X wrote, you're a multi-billion dollar company, pay real animators. Another one said, I miss the ads that pulled at the heartstrings. Soulless shows up over and over. Nobody in that pile is asking for better tire physics. They're asking, why did the richest soda company on earth decide the people who used to make this ad weren't worth it.
[GUEST] Okay, but I have to be fair to Coke here.
[HOST] Go ahead. Be fair.
[GUEST] Their testing said people loved it. Their creative strategy VP said it scored off the charts. System One gave it five point nine stars, which is the top score in their model.
[HOST] All true. And the ad pulled what The Hollywood Reporter called billions of impressions. I don't doubt any of it. On a TV, with the volume up, between two football plays, the trucks and the jingle still work. That spot did its job.
[GUEST] So where's the wreck?
[HOST] In the conversation about the brand. A media monitoring firm called CARMA tracked it. Before the ad, about twenty-four percent of the conversation about Coke was positive. After the ad, ten percent. Negative barely moved, thirty-one to thirty-two.
[GUEST:thoughtful] So the haters didn't grow. The fans went quiet.
[HOST] The fans went quiet. And that's the number I'd lose sleep over. Angry people are loud for a week. A fan who stops defending you is gone a lot longer than that.
[STINGER]
[SECTION 2]
[GUEST] So what's the bonehead move? Using AI?
[HOST] The AI was a business decision, and in my opinion that call belongs to them. The bonehead move came after, in how they talked about it. Twice.
[GUEST] Walk me through it.
[HOST] Coke puts out a behind-the-scenes video. And the voiceover brags that five specialists churned out more than seventy thousand video clips in thirty days.
[GUEST:sarcastic] To an audience that is mad about jobs.
[HOST] To an audience that is mad about jobs. You got criticized for replacing the crew, so your victory lap is a video about how small the crew was. Then the chief marketing officer tells The Wall Street Journal they used to start a year ahead, and now you can get it done in around a month.
[GUEST] That's a great sentence for an earnings call.
[HOST] It's a perfect sentence for an earnings call. Investors hear fast and cheap and they clap. Your customers hear fast and cheap and they think about their cousin who does animation and just lost a contract. Same sentence, two audiences, opposite reactions. Coke handed the investor story to the customer.
[GUEST] And the guy in charge of generative AI?
[HOST:annoyed] Pratik Thakar. He tells The Hollywood Reporter that last year people criticized the craftsmanship, and this year the craftsmanship is ten times better. Then the line everybody screenshotted. We need to keep moving forward and pushing the envelope. The genie is out of the bottle, and you're not going to put it back in.
[GUEST] Oof. The genie line.
[HOST] The genie line tells the critics they've already lost. Maybe he's right about the industry. Doesn't matter. When your customer says I'm upset, and the brand answers you can't stop this, you've stopped talking to a customer and started arguing with one.
[GUEST:curious] Okay, grade the response. The whole thing.
[HOST] Two grades. Keeping the ad on the air, I'll give them a B. Their testing backed it, it moved product, and pulling a holiday spot because the comments got rough would've been its own mistake. That's a call they get to make.
[GUEST] And the talking?
[HOST] The talking gets a D. They heard a values complaint and answered it with a production report. Better wheels, more clips, fewer people, higher scores. Every answer was true, and every answer was about Coke.
[GUEST] Was there anything good in there?
[HOST:happy] One thing, and they buried it. The same campaign had a traditionally made spot called A Holiday Memory. A woman finds a snow globe and remembers a party where somebody sings Feliz Navidad. Real people, real faces. Coke had a human story sitting right there, and they let the AI spot do all the talking.
[GUEST] So they had the answer in their own campaign.
[HOST] They had it, and nobody put it in front of the people who were mad. Lead with the snow globe, let the trucks ride along, and half that fight never starts.
[GUEST:thoughtful] Does any of this hurt Coke, though? It's Coke.
[HOST] Coke survives. Coke survives everything. They've got enough goodwill banked to lose some and keep selling. But that's the trap for everybody listening. A small brand watches Coke shrug it off and thinks, eh, it was fine. It wasn't fine for Coke. Coke just has the cushion. Your brand doesn't.
[GUEST] Which is how you get to a bagel shop in Austin.
[HOST] Which is exactly how you get there. Two years of Coke headlines trained people to scan every food image for AI and go after it. The bagel shop walked into a crowd Coke spent two Christmases warming up.
[STINGER]
[SECTION 3]
[GUEST] Okay. Prevention. What stops year two from happening?
[HOST:excited] Year one's comment section. That's the cheapest research Coke will ever get, and it was free and public. Somebody should've sat down in January, read a thousand of those comments, and sorted them into two piles. Quality complaints and values complaints.
[GUEST] Because you fix those differently.
[HOST] Completely differently. A quality complaint, you fix the wheels. A values complaint, you can't fix with better rendering. You fix it by showing people who made the thing, or by changing what you make. Coke's pile was mostly values, and they spent a year on the wheels.
[GUEST] So what's the year-two plan that works?
[HOST] If I'm running that channel, three moves. First, the people who made it are the story, out loud and by name. The animators, the art directors, the editors, whoever touched it. Second, the efficiency story stays in the trade press and the earnings call, and it never shows up on the brand's own feed. Third, lead the season with the human spot, and let the AI piece be one part of it.
[GUEST] And you can still use AI in that plan?
[HOST] Sure. Use it. Just never make the tool the hero of a holiday ad. The hero is a family, a truck, a memory. The audience doesn't need to hear about your pipeline on Christmas.
[GUEST] Fine. Storm-proofing. Make it work for someone who isn't Coke.
[HOST] Five pieces. One. Before you repeat anything that got blasted, do the comment audit. A real person reads the old comments and writes one sentence: what were they actually mad about. That sentence goes on top of the next brief.
[GUEST] Two.
[HOST] Two. Know which question you're answering. If the complaint is about values, a better version of the same thing makes it worse, because now it looks like you heard them and didn't care.
[GUEST:mischievous] Three. Please say the genie thing.
[HOST:sarcastic] Three. Ban the genie sentence. Inevitable, can't stop progress, deal with it. Any line that tells customers they lose doesn't ship on a brand account. Write it in the playbook.
[GUEST] Four.
[HOST] Four. Two audiences, two stories, and a wall between them. Fast and cheap is for the CFO. The customer gets who made this and why it's for them. Nobody posts the CFO version on Instagram.
[GUEST] Five?
[HOST] Five, and this one's for the small brands. Your food photo is a promise. If a customer walks in and the plate doesn't look like the post, you lied to them, and AI makes that lie very easy to tell. Shoot the real plate. Bad light, a phone, a paper towel in the corner. It'll beat a perfect fake every time.
[GUEST:thoughtful] And if you already posted the fake?
[HOST] Do what El Pollo Rico did. Say it plainly, say you're stopping, say why, and don't argue in the comments. Their statement drew almost five thousand likes, mostly people thanking them. Owning it fast turned the same crowd into fans.
[GUEST] Give me the line people screenshot.
[HOST] Your customers don't grade the pixels. They grade what you think of them.
[STINGER]
[OUTRO]
[HOST] That's the wreck. If you run a food or beverage brand and your feed is full of stock shots, renders, or photos that look like they could be anybody's, that's the problem I fix. I've been doing social media in food and beverage for over fifteen years, and the work is real content: short-form video and photography of your actual product, made by people who've held it, so your customers see what they're really going to get. If your feed looks like everybody else's, let's go shoot the real thing. Find me at gallucci dot net, or DM at gallucciNET on Instagram or LinkedIn.
[GUEST] Thanks for riding along, everybody.
[HOST] For Chloe Dawn, I'm giovanni gallucci. Shoot the real plate, and catch The Weekend Trend Report on Saturday.