Mainstream companies may be using AI to generate ads now, but the results (if McDonald’s AI-generated holiday ad is any indication), is still somewhat lacking.

According to Futurism (McDonald’s Pulls Down AI-Generated Holiday Ad After Deluge of Mockery, written by Joe Wilkins and available here), mainstream companies like Coca-Cola and Google are jumping on the bandwagon 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 ad is AI, and revolves around the thesis that the holiday season is the “most terrible time of the year.”

As Wilkins notes: “Humbug aside, the ad assaults the viewer with 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.”

Apparently, after 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 – I was, and the ad…well…it’s a lot.

Following the outcry, The Sweetshop — the production company hired by TBWA\Neboko to create the ad — released a statement (that Wilkins characterizes as “incredibly defensive”) justifying 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.

Sweetshop even went so far as to argue that the amount of labor hours spent cleaning up AI hallucinations justified the end result.

Gee, I thought AI was supposed to make video creation easier? 😉 Apparently, it still requires a lot of work with no guarantee that the end product will be favorably received. Just like non-AI generated ads.

Part of the backlash may be due to the use of AI to generate these ads in the first place. When the quality gets better, we’ll see how much of that backlash remains.

So, what do you think? Do you like or hate McDonald’s AI-generated holiday ad? Check out the clip above and let me know your thoughts. And please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image from McDonald’s AI-generated holiday ad.

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