The Control-Chaos Matrix for AI
And how five brands are seeking to tame or lean into the chaos of AI
I was walking down Venice Beach when I noticed a new billboard on each lifeguard tower. A series of Coca-Cola ads: sun-drenched young people living an impossibly joyful life, cracking open a Coke. Their smiles were borderline too much, their hands an odd angle to be holding a bottle, and on each tower, a different view, a different set of polished faces, but all the same emptiness. And I had to wonder, was this AI?
Shortly before Coca-Cola released its disastrous AI-driven holiday ad last year, Coca-Cola’s CEO James Quincey said, “We are starting to make ads, looking at where to use them and when, and seeing whether we can have true life quality through AI…We’re seeing if it can be made faster and cheaper, and we’re arriving at that point with the technology.” In fact, they’ve invested upward of a billion dollars in AI over the next 5 years.
I couldn’t find evidence if Coca-Cola’s summer campaign was, indeed, made with AI. But whether it used generative AI or not, the sheen of it feels very AI. And I realized, Coca-Cola is seeking to tame content with AI.
Looking across brands using AI, I’ve started to see distinct aspects of how marketers use AI.
AI content – ads, social, or campaigns created by generative tools, and AI action – tools or brand experiences built using AI.
Tame – Controlling AI to fit brand guidelines, identity, or polish, and Untamed – taking on AI’s weirdness, speed, and chaos.
Tame: Seeking Control
Driven by a demanding bottom line, marketing is a cost center and generative AI holds the deep promise of radically cheap content production. Agencies and in-house teams have stumbled along, trying to avoid lawsuits and customer backlash, trying to find or upskill talent for a tool that isn’t yet native, and trying not to fall deep in the uncanny valley of AI visuals. But AI has stayed unruly. Changing so fast it’s hard to keep up, much less learn every new tool. Putting out wild images and hallucinations. Challenging people with a mastery of tools that don’t talk back.
Coca-Cola wants to tame AI-generated content. On top of putting out glossy, soulless billboards for their summer campaign, Coca-Cola also recently announced a tool that allows it to better manage its logo across hundreds of agencies, markets, and geographies.
When it comes to brand actions, AI is a new super-power. If a brand can point to AI, it’ll still getting attention for it. See e.l.f.’s new color analysis tool. It analyzes your color palette from a photo, and pops you over to Pinterest for a curated mix of elf products and other inspiration (I’m a warm autumn). Before the AI hype cycle, this kind of brand action might’ve passed quietly as a nice utility. Add ‘AI’ to the headline, and it’s clickbait.
Untamed: Leaning into the chaos
Not all brands are playing it safe.
When it comes to content, Pika, an AI video-generation tool, made waves with their Pikapolocypse ad. It starts with a playful AI world that’s masking a sci-fi hellscape, and ends with the Black-Mirror-esque tagline “Reality is Optional.”
Kalshi, a sports betting site, used Google’s VEO3 to make an ad for $2,000 and air it during the NBA finals. It also reveled in the unpolished AI aesthetic, ending with the nihilist tagline “The World’s Mad. Trade It”. Both these brands choose to embrace a chaotic future, where AI rules and no one believes in much—and it’s no surprise that they’re new brands, without the history of brand building, that gives them the permission to show up in a wilder way.
Dove has been a disciplined brand builder for decades, celebrating real beauty against a backdrop of fake beauty standards and Photoshopped models. When AI emerged as yet another force distorting women’s self-image, Dove identified an untamed aspect of the technology—and responded with a brand action. ”Keep Beauty Real” called out the overly perfect images of women that AI generated, provided a prompt guidebook, and committed to not using AI in their advertising.
Where do you want to sit on the matrix?
For marketers, AI has become an imperative. The question is how. This matrix offers a perspective on your approach.
Start by asking:
Are you seeking to control AI to fit your brand, or leaning into its chaos?
This helps you to determine how you want to show up.
And are you focusing on content or on brand actions (or both)?
This helps you identify how and where to invest.
Brands like Coca-Cola are taming content —controlling AI output to fit existing brand guidelines, and investing heavily to get there. e.l.f. created a tame action, using AI for functional, on-brand utilities.
Meanwhile Pika and Kalshi create untamed content, letting AI’s chaos drive cultural relevance—and at a lower cost than trying to control it. And Dove highlighted the untamed with a brand action, pushing back against AI bias with a purpose-driven intervention.
These approaches aren’t mutually exclusive; brands can tackle both content creation and brand actions, and depending on what the brand stands for, can both tame AI and and address its more chaotic edges. But the brands that win won't just adopt AI; they’ll decide exactly what to do with it and what it says about them.