Coca-Cola Debuts Fan Zhiyi AI Avatar for World Cup

PR Newswire reports that Coca-Cola China launched a World Cup sports marketing campaign featuring a real-time interactive AI avatar of Chinese football icon Fan Zhiyi, timed for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Per PR Newswire, the avatar was developed in collaboration with Baidu Yijing, described as Baidu's multi-agent AI avatar platform. PR Newswire states the activation includes a World Cup-themed AIGC creative film alongside the avatar.

According to PR Newswire, the Fan Zhiyi avatar reproduces the player's likeness, expressions, and voice with high fidelity, supports low-latency, real-time conversations, and is available 24/7 for fan interaction. PR Newswire attributes those capabilities to Baidu Yijing's multi-agent architecture and related AI technologies.

Public reporting frames this campaign as an example of using generative AI to extend celebrity engagement in consumer marketing. For FMCG brands and sports sponsors, AIGC paired with interactive avatars creates a new format for 1:many engagement that can be personalized at scale. Comparable activations involve trade-offs between creative fidelity and operational costs, including inference compute, moderation, and licensing for likeness and voice.

• •Adoption signals: whether other sponsors at the 2026 World Cup announce similar avatar activations.
• •Technical indicators: disclosures about underlying model types, latency metrics, or use of on-premise vs cloud inference.
• •Safety and rights: how likeness and voice rights are managed and what moderation approaches are documented.

These activations serve as case studies for integrating real-time conversational AI into marketing funnels, while also highlighting engineering requirements around latency, scalability, and safety moderation.