- McDonald’s stopped airing an AI-generated Christmas ad
- Viewers complained about its strange visuals and chaotic style
- There may not be much public appetite for AI-created ads
A McDonald’s commercial in the Netherlands made with AI has disappeared from screens after causing an avalanche of mockery and irritation from viewers. Complaints about disturbing visuals and a strangely violent tone for a holiday ad meant the ad for “the most terrible time of the year” only appeared for a few weeks.
Advertising agency The Sweetshop produced the AI video using its proprietary engine called The Gardening Club. It combined several quick sequences of disastrous moments during the holiday season using slightly different people and settings familiar to AI video viewers. Balloon hands, fireball cookies, and eyes that were a little too wide proclaimed that holiday stress could only be relieved with McDonald’s. McDonald’s removed the video from YouTube three days after it was launched, disabling comments before removing it completely. But it had already been recovered and distributed on the Internet.
The Sweetshop, the production company behind the campaign, released a defensive public statement positioning the ad not as an AI stunt but as a handcrafted film made through enormous effort. The process, they claimed, involved seven weeks of sleepless nights and ten AI and post-production specialists.
“We generated what looked like dailies – thousands of takes – and then shaped them during editing, as we would with any high-quality production. This wasn’t an AI trick. It was a movie,” Melanie Bridge, CEO of The Sweetshop, wrote in response to the ad’s removal (itself since removed). “I don’t see this spot as a novelty or a cute seasonal experiment. To me, it’s proof of something much bigger: when craft and technology meet intention, they can create a work that feels truly cinematic. So no, AI didn’t make this film. We made it.”
Yes, the ad presents itself as a corporate attempt at a shortcut to produce a real advertisement while claiming to represent an artistic risk-taking. But it is also true that it is not easy to make the AI’s hallucinations coherent. Making bad AI presentable takes time and creativity.
Yet failure at this level feels like an attack on the viewer’s intelligence, not to mention taste. Quite the opposite of the warm seasonal feeling that McDonald’s was probably hoping to evoke.
AI Advertising Failure
Generative AI tools are now cheap, accessible and fast. Marketing teams around the world use them to create ads quickly and affordably. But this ad shows that just because you can create an ad with AI doesn’t mean you should.
And McDonald’s certainly isn’t the first brand to venture into the uncanny valley this year. Coca-Cola’s 2025 holiday campaign received similar criticism for its jarring pace and algorithmic blandness. AI-generated ads are becoming more and more common – and more and more hated. When it comes to tone, continuity, and visual consistency, AI still can’t compete with human production.
McDonald’s may not suffer long-term damage, but the incident will remain another example of what happens when brands treat AI like a gimmick. You can try selling fries with an AI video, but it won’t work if people feel bad watching the ad.
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