McDonald’s has withdrawn an AI-generated Christmas advert released in the Netherlands after it was met with strong backlash on social media.
The 45-second video, produced using generative AI tools, was published on the McDonald’s Netherlands YouTube channel on 6 December. The advert showed a series of mishaps that can occur during the holiday period and used the line “the most terrible time of the year,” presenting time spent with the fast-food chain as a more appealing alternative.
Viewers quickly condemned the advert’s appearance, including its rapid sequence of stitched-together scenes and what they described as distorted, uncanny characters. One commenter called it “the most god-awful ad I’ve seen this year,” while others described it as “creepy” and “poorly edited.”
Generative AI video clips often degrade in quality after several seconds, and most AI-generated footage typically runs between six and ten seconds. Even a 45-second advert therefore usually requires numerous short segments edited together.
McDonald’s Netherlands removed the video on 9 December. Speaking to the BBC News, the company said the advert was intended to reflect stressful holiday moments but added that the episode served as “an important learning” as it continued to examine “the effective use of AI.”
The advert was created by Dutch agency TBWA\Neboko and US production company The Sweetshop. The Sweetshop’s chief executive, Melanie Bridge, defended the production after the video was made private. She told Futurism that the process took seven weeks and involved “thousands of takes,” explaining that a team “hardly slept” while generating and editing the material. “This wasn’t an AI trick,” she said. “It was a film.”
A longer statement from The Sweetshop, later deleted, detailed the extensive technical work used to assemble the advert. It said up to 10 in-house AI and post-production specialists worked through Google Earth plates, style-transfer methods, photo repair, custom LoRAs, control nets, bespoke ComfyUI graphs and further corrections before final finishing. The company argued that the labour required to fix output from generative tools demonstrated the level of craft involved. “So no – AI didn’t make this film. We did,” the statement said.
Major brands have increasingly used generative AI to create promotional content in shorter production cycles. Coca-Cola has released two AI-generated Christmas adverts in a row, with analytics company Social Sprout reporting a 61% positive sentiment score for its latest campaign. Other firms have faced criticism, including Italian luxury brand Valentino, whose AI-generated campaign was described by some viewers as “cheap” and “lazy.”
This appears to be McDonald’s first AI-produced TV advert, although McDonald’s Mexico previously posted AI-generated images earlier in the year.