McDonald’s AI Christmas Ad Might Be Worse Than Coke’s AI Ad
Do you remember the terrible AI-generated Coca-Cola ad from last year? Well, now we have an even worse AI-generated McDonald’s ad. It isn’t worse because it looks uglier; nothing could top that. It’s worse because, despite all the hours poured into it, it still looks uncanny and strangely off.
McDonald’s Netherlands has just released their first fully AI-generated Christmas commercial, and people are not happy with the results. The ad was produced over seven weeks by ten specialists who treated the process like a real film shoot, directing each moment while AI tools handled the visuals.
The agency TBWA\NEBOKO and directing duo MAMA leaned into the idea of flipping the familiar ‘Most Wonderful Time of the Year’ into ‘the most terrible time of the year.’ The intention was to depict the Christmas season’s stress and how bad it can get, suggesting you should spend it at McDonald’s instead. They didn’t realize this completely misses the mark, because a lot of people actually enjoy Christmas and the time leading up to it. Some sources claim that this ad was prompted by research from MediaTest showing that two-thirds of Dutch consumers wish they had more time for themselves during the season. However, I couldn’t find such findings published online. What I did find instead were multiple studies from institutions such as King’s College London and Harvard Business School suggesting that about 8 in 10 people enjoy Christmas, and that common Christmas rituals such as tree decorating, preparing the home, making holiday plans, and preparing meals increase the enjoyment of the holiday.
The generating process
The production company, The Sweetshop, says this was not a “prompt and hope” job. The team built an extensive pipeline using Google Earth plates, style-transfer, pixel repair, custom model tweaks, and detailed compositing. Thousands of iterations were generated, reviewed, and reshaped until the sequences matched their plan.
They also had to fight the models to avoid cheerful holiday imagery. The AI kept insisting on “perfect snowy Christmas,” while the brief called for bleak, chaotic scenes. Sweetshop jokingly called this “psychological warfare.”
Their leadership insists the real work came from people, not the model. The film required thousands of decisions, corrections, refinements, and visual planning. In their words, “AI didn’t make this film, we did.”
Public reaction
Public opinion toward the ad has been overwhelmingly negative. Many viewers described the visuals as uncanny, and the message as confusing. A common opinion was that a brand with McDonald’s resources could easily hire real creatives and produce a thoughtful holiday campaign rather than relying on “AI slop”.
The Sweetshop stressed that this wasn’t meant to cut costs but rather to test new creative tools. Still, anyone watching can see that it also serves as a boundary-pushing moment as they try to find out where the public draws the line on AI in advertising.
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