People aren\u2019t lovin\u2019 it. <\/p>\n
McDonald\u2019s was forced to pull down an AI-generated Christmas commercial from YouTube after some consumers said the AI-slop-filled tongue-in-cheek take on the holidays was distasteful.<\/p>\n
The ad, titled \u201cIt\u2019s the most terrible time of the year,\u201d was a satirical take on holiday realities. It showed a series of short, chaotic clips of people braving the winter, tripping while carrying overloaded gift bags, getting stuck in tangled lights, burning homemade cookies or starting an unexpected cooking fire during a family gathering.<\/p>\n
The ad agency TBWA\\NEBOKO collaborated with film production company Sweetshop, whose Los Angeles-based directing duo Mark Potoka and Matt Spicer shot the film. The 45-second ad was created for McDonald\u2019s Netherlands.<\/p>\n
It ends with a call to ditch the madness and hide out in McDonald\u2019s till January. The ad, meant to spread cheer, irked viewers. <\/p>\n
\u201cEven without all the ai slop this ad feels incredibly odd,\u201d said one comment on the commercial posted on YouTube. \u201cDitch your family and hide in mcdonalds because christmas sucks???\u201d <\/p>\n
Some said the ad was a sloppy move by one of the world\u2019s largest advertisers.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe McDonald\u2019s ad emphasizes all that is negative about the holiday season, and the suggestion that McDonald\u2019s is a respite from such negative experiences is not credible,\u201d said David Stewart, emeritus professor of marketing at Loyola Marymount University. \u201cIt is likely that a very unhappy human came up with the idea of denigrating the holiday experience, even if AI was used to create part of the ad.\u201d<\/p>\n
After the McDonald\u2019s backlash, the Sweetshop said it used AI as a tool for the commercial but a lot of human effort went into it as well. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe generated what felt like dailies \u2014 thousands of takes \u2014 then shaped them in the edit just as we would on any high-craft production,\u201d the company said in a statement<\/a>. \u201cThis wasn\u2019t an AI trick. It was a film.\u201d<\/p>\n McDonald didn\u2019t immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n Mainstream brands are gradually embracing AI-generated ads. Last month, Coca-Cola released a holiday ad in which a Coca-Cola truck drives through snow and forests, awakening animals and lighting up trees, then pulls up to a town square. <\/p>\n This is the second year in a row Coca-Cola has dropped an AI holiday ad despite widespread artist pushback. <\/p>\n \u201cAI is gaining traction for the creation of ads because it is viewed as a way to save costs,\u201d Stewart said. <\/p>\n More brands, including Google<\/a>, Toys R Us<\/a> and Under Armour,<\/a> have produced synthetic ads. Proponents of AI ads see them as a change from traditional advertising.<\/p>\n \u201cWhether we like the ad itself, McDonald\u2019s is making a statement with this campaign: AI has changed the playbook. As one of the largest consumer brands on the planet, McDonald\u2019s is reading the tea leaves of what\u2019s to come for brand marketing and is aggressively indexing its brand for the new generative decision funnel,\u201d said Justin Inman, chief executive of Emberos, a platform that monitors how brands appear inside major AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Gemini.<\/p>\n