McDonald’s forced to take down AI generated commercial on YouTube: “The future is here, and it’s not looking good”

Brendan Behan, the Irish writer, once said, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary.” So if an ad gets killed off within a couple of days of launching, does it mean it actually was bad publicity—a far cry from the more common refrain that all publicity is good publicity?

That certainly seems to be the case with McDonald’s Netherlands’ 45-second AI-generated Christmas commercial, ‘It’s the Most Terrible Time of the Year’, which appeared on YouTube on December 6 and was pulled just days later after a wave of overwhelmingly negative feedback.

Because McDonald’s removed the ad, it’s no longer available from them, but it was still being hosted on AdForum, a marketing research site, at the time of publishing. You can watch it there in all its, er, glory. The AI-generated visuals show chaotic holiday mishaps—exploding trees, botched dinners, traffic jams with Santa—all ending with the suggestion to “hide out in McDonald’s till January.”

What was wrong with the McDonald’s AI advert?

The ad is unmistakably AI-generated, with all the usual problems that come with an algorithm generating content. Viewers quickly criticized it on social media for being “creepy,” “soulless,” and full of uncanny, jittery visuals. As is often the case with AI-generated video, the scenes flip rapidly because the model loses continuity after a few seconds. The physics are slightly off. The color grading is nasty. Everything feels just a little wrong.

The other problem is that the premise itself felt tone-deaf. McDonald’s Netherlands said the ad, with all its horrible scenarios, was meant to reflect the stressful moments of the holidays, but admitted that for many people the season is still “the most wonderful time of the year.”

Even people who hate Christmas could probably come up with funnier mishaps than the ones shown here. Critics blasted the ad for being artificial, incoherent, and emotionally hollow.

Handled by a human team, with sharp copywriting and warm, relatable actors, you might be able to pull off a wry nod to holiday chaos that still left people feeling warm. But feeding the idea into an AI model turned a weak premise into something truly abominable.

Producers defend McDonald’s ad

The CEO of Sweetshop, the production company hired by the ad agencies to create the spot, issued a defensive statement arguing that the team spent weeks crafting the ad and that it should be seen as a film shaped by human effort rather than a “quick AI trick.”

“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,” he wrote. “We generated what felt like dailies—thousands of takes—then shaped them in the edit just as we would on any high-craft production.”

“I don’t see this spot as a novelty or a cute seasonal experiment. 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.”

What this sounds like, translated into plain English, is that the team had to prompt the AI thousands and thousands of times in an attempt to wrestle it toward something usable. And even after all that, the final product still felt cold, uncanny, and off-putting.

Anyone who has tried to get AI to generate a specific image knows this process: it’s incredibly frustrating and rarely produces the exact picture in your head. That’s fine when you’re making a homemade birthday card for Aunt Marjorie and just want to include a few things she likes—even if the cats aren’t playing with the yarn the way you hoped. It’s another thing entirely when you’re creating an ad for a major global fast-food chain that spends nearly half a billion dollars a year on advertising.

Has an AI ad ever actually worked?

Before writing off the entire field, it’s worth noting that one AI ad did land well recently: a surreal, scrappy 30-second commercial produced for the prediction market Kalshi. It ran during the NBA Finals, of all places, and became a viral hit.

Rather than pretending AI could mimic traditional filmmaking, the Kalshi team leaned into what AI is good at—strange imagery, fast cuts, dream logic—and made something intentionally bizarre that grabbed you by the visuals. It cost only a few thousand dollars to produce and ended up drawing millions of views online and positive coverage.

So AI can be used successfully in advertising. But when brands try to make AI pretend to be human, the results so far are almost always uncanny, hollow, or outright ugly. The Kalshi spot succeeded by avoiding that trap entirely.

What is AI doing to advertising?

The broader concern is that advertising executives seem determined to push AI into campaigns whether the public likes it or not. As one social-media user put it, “The future is here, and it’s not looking good.”

As critics like Cory Doctorow argue, the big promise AI companies make to executives is simple: fire your workers and replace them with AI. You keep half the salaries; the AI company takes the other half.

Many agency bosses would no doubt love to replace illustrators, directors, designers, camera crews, and actors with AI systems.

Right now, the good news—for everyone who prefers their advertising to look human—is that the output is still woeful. The worry is that agencies will keep pushing anyway, hoping the technology improves fast enough to justify cutting costs.

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