People aren’t lovin’ it.
McDonald’s was forced to pull down an AI-generated Christmas commercial from YouTube after some consumers said the AI-slop-filled tongue-in-cheek take on the holidays was distasteful.
The ad, titled “It’s the most terrible time of the year,” was a satirical take on holiday realities. It showed a series of short, chaotic clips of people braving the winter, tripping while carrying overloaded gift bags, getting stuck in tangled lights, burning homemade cookies or starting an unexpected cooking fire during a family gathering.
The ad agency TBWA\NEBOKO collaborated with film production company Sweetshop to create the 45-second ad for McDonald’s Netherlands.
The AI ad ends with a call to ditch the madness and hide out in McDonald’s till January. The ad, meant to spread cheer, irked viewers.
“Even without all the ai slop this ad feels incredibly odd,” said one comment on the commercial posted on YouTube. “Ditch your family and hide in mcdonalds because christmas sucks???”
Some said the ad was a sloppy move by one of the world’s largest advertisers.
“The McDonald’s ad emphasizes all that is negative about the holiday season, and the suggestion that McDonald’s is a respite from such negative experiences is not credible,” said David Stewart, emeritus professor of marketing at Loyola Marymount University. “It is likely that a very unhappy human came up with the idea of denigrating the holiday experience, even if AI was used to create part of the ad.”
After the McDonald’s backlash, the Sweetshop said it used AI as a tool for the commercial but a lot of human effort went into it as well.
“We generated what felt like dailies — thousands of takes — then shaped them in the edit just as we would on any high-craft production,” the company said in a statement. “This wasn’t an AI trick.”
Still, McDonald’s Netherlands pulled the ad.
“McDonald’s Netherlands has decided to remove our AI-generated Christmas advert. It was intended to reflect the stressful moments that can occur during the holidays in the Netherlands, but we recognize that for many of our guests, the season is ‘most wonderful time of the year,’” McDonald’s Netherlands said in a statement. “We respect that and remain committed to creating experiences that offer Good Times and Good Food for everyone.”
Though the initial release said that Los Angeles-based directing duo Mark Potoka and Matt Spicer shot the film, the duo said in an email that they had resigned after being cut out of the production process.
“With lack of creative oversight and not being able to speak to or see what was made or able to effect the work as directors we ethically felt it was right to resign from the project and production company at large,” they said.
The Sweetshop website has removed any mention of the directing duo, and its CEO also deleted a LinkedIn post that mentioned their association.
Mainstream brands are gradually embracing AI-generated ads. Last month, Coca-Cola released a holiday ad in which a Coca-Cola truck drives through snow and forests, awakening animals and lighting up trees, then pulls up to a town square.
This is the second year in a row Coca-Cola has dropped an AI holiday ad despite widespread artist pushback.
“AI is gaining traction for the creation of ads because it is viewed as a way to save costs,” Stewart said.
More brands, including Google, Toys R Us and Under Armour, have produced synthetic ads. Proponents of AI ads see them as a change from traditional advertising.
“Whether we like the ad itself, McDonald’s is making a statement with this campaign: AI has changed the playbook. As one of the largest consumer brands on the planet, McDonald’s is reading the tea leaves of what’s to come for brand marketing and is aggressively indexing its brand for the new generative decision funnel,” said Justin Inman, chief executive of Emberos, a platform that monitors how brands appear inside major AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Gemini.
AI-powered search could influence $750 billion in revenue by 2028, and half of consumers now use chatbots to discover brands, according to McKinsey & Co.
Such an association with AI may even boost McDonald’s visibility inside chatbots, surfacing its brand name ahead of others.
“Love it or hate it, expect to see more of it,” Inman said. “McDonald’s getting thousands of people to prompt McDonald’s + AI will greatly benefit their overall brand visibility.”
