People don't love it.
McDonald's was forced to remove an AI-generated Christmas commercial from YouTube after some consumers said the tongue-in-cheek AI-filled version of the holiday was distasteful.
The ad, titled “It's the Most Terrible Time of the Year,” was a satirical take on the reality of Christmas. It showed a series of short, chaotic clips of people braving the winter, tripping while carrying overloaded gift bags, getting caught in tangled lights, burning homemade cookies or lighting an unexpected kitchen fire during a family gathering.
Advertising agency TBWANEBOKO collaborated with film production company Sweetshop to create the 45-second ad for McDonald's Netherlands.
The AI ad ends with a call to abandon the madness and hide out at McDonald's until January. The ad, meant to spread joy, upset viewers.
“Even without all the AI crap, this ad feels incredibly weird,” read one comment on the commercial posted to YouTube. “Get rid of your family and hide at McDonalds because Christmas sucks???”
Some said the announcement was a careless move by one of the world's largest advertisers.
“McDonald's ad emphasizes everything negative about the holiday season, and the suggestion that McDonald's is a respite from such negative experiences is not credible,” said David Stewart, professor emeritus of marketing at Loyola Marymount University. “It's likely that a very disgruntled human being came up with the idea to denigrate the vacation experience, even if AI was used to create part of the ad.”
After McDonald's backlash, Sweetshop said it used AI as a tool for the commercial, but a lot of human effort also went into it.
“We generated what looked like dailies (thousands of shots) and then shaped them in editing just as we would in any high-craft production,” the company said in a statement. “This wasn't an AI trick. It was a movie.”
McDonald's did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Although the initial statement said that Los Angeles-based directing duo Mark Potoka and Matt Spicer filmed the film, the duo said in an email that they had resigned after being excluded from the production process.
“With the lack of creative oversight and not being able to speak or see what was made or be able to do the work as directors, ethically we felt it was right to resign from the project and the production company in general,” they said.
The Sweetshop website removed any mention of the directing duo, and its CEO also removed a LinkedIn post that mentioned their partnership.
Major brands are gradually adopting AI-generated ads. Last month, Coca-Cola released a Christmas ad in which a Coca-Cola truck drives through snow and forests, waking up animals and lighting up trees, and then stops in a city square.
This is the second year in a row that Coca-Cola has released an AI Christmas ad despite widespread rejection from the artists.
“AI is gaining traction for ad creation because it is seen as a way to save costs,” Stewart said.
More brands including Google, toys r us and under armor, have produced synthetic advertisements. Proponents of AI ads see them as a departure from traditional advertising.
“Whether we like the ad itself, McDonald's is making a statement with this campaign: AI has changed the manual. 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, CEO of Emberos, a platform that monitors how brands appear within leading AI assistants like 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 a partnership with AI can even increase McDonald's visibility within chatbots, making its brand appear ahead of others.
“Love it or hate it, expect to see more,” Inman said. “Getting thousands of people to drive McDonald's + AI will greatly benefit the overall visibility of their brand.”
