Thanks to the rise in popularity of generative AI, mainstream companies like Coca-Cola and Google are jumping to use AI to plop out new advertisements. There’s just one issue: pretty much everybody hates it.
This year, McDonald’s decided to get in on the corporate slopfest with a 45-second Christmas spot cooked up for its Netherlands division by the ad agency TBWA\Neboko. The entire thing is AI, and revolves around the thesis that the holiday season is the “most terrible time of the year.”
Humbug aside, the ad assaults the viewer with a rapidly-changing scenes played out in AI’s typically nauseating fashion. Because most videos generated with AI tend to lose continuity after a handful of seconds, short and rapidly-changing scenes have become one of the key tells that the clip you’re watching is AI.
Similar to Coke’s 2025 Holiday ad, the McDonald’s spot is like a visual seizure, full of grotesque characters, horrible color grading, and hackneyed AI approximations of basic physics.
Though the abomination of an ad only has 20,000 views on YouTube, backlash in the comments was so intense that McDonald’s shut down comments over the weekend, before delisting the video entirely. (Some marketing research databases managed to scrape the clip, if you’re curious.)
“The future is here, and it’s not looking good,” one poster mused under an aggregator account on Instagram. “So a company with that amount of resources couldn’t create a full production with a big team of people to work together and create something actually worth while?” asked another. “Brilliant.”
Following the outcry, The Sweetshop — the production company hired by TBWA\Neboko to create the ad — released an incredibly defensive statementjustifying their work.
“For seven weeks, we hardly slept, with up to 10 of our in-house AI and post specialists at The Gardening Club [our in-house AI engine] working in lockstep with the directors,” Sweetshop’s CEO wrote. “This wasn’t an AI trick. It was a film.”
Sweetshop even went so far as to argue that the amount of labor hours wasted cleaning up AI hallucinations justifies the horrible end product.
“We generated what felt like dailies — thousands of takes — then shaped them in the edit just as we would on any high-craft production,” they said. “This wasn’t an AI trick. It was a film.”
“I don’t see this spot as a novelty or a cute seasonal experiment,” the CEO continued. “To me, it’s evidence of something much bigger: that when craft and technology meet with intention, they can create work that feels genuinely cinematic. So no – AI didn’t make this film. We did.”
Though this seems to be McDonald’s first AI commercial, it isn’t the corporation’s first brush wish the tech. Back in March, when the Studio Ghibli AI pictures were all the rage thanks to ChatGPT, McDonald’s Mexico jumped on the trend, posting AI memes on its social media accounts. (Those didn’t fare much better.)
So while the contractors behind the campaign seem content to pat themselves on the back, the public sentiment seems clear: if we have to live in a world where we’re constantly blasted by obnoxious ads, they could at least be made by a human.
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