McDonald’s Pulls AI Christmas Ad After Backlash

Earlier this month, McDonald’s Netherlands released a Christmas commercial that fell flat, created using AI tools. After it went viral for all the wrong reasons over the weekend, the fast-food giant pulled it from circulation.

Following in the footsteps of other brands, McDonald’s launched a new AI-generated ad just in time for the holiday season. This ad showcases various AI-crafted scenes depicting the frustrating and less-than-ideal moments that can arise during this festive time. While the concept is amusing, it’s tough to fully appreciate when the AI-generated quality is so apparent.

Typically, I’d share the ad from an official source, like McDonald’s YouTube channel. However, as noted by an outlet, it seems the company has completely removed it from the internet after previously disabling comments. Instead, here’s a reupload from the YouTube channel CongenAI:

What’s particularly wild is that the studio responsible for the poorly received AI ad claimed to have spent weeks developing it. Seriously. Here’s the full statement from the studio, Sweetshop, which has also been taken down:

“For seven weeks, we hardly slept, with up to 10 of our in-house AI and post specialists at The Gardening Club working in lockstep with the directors. Every shot traveled through a rigorously engineered toolchain: real Google Earth plates, advanced style-transfer, pixel-level photo repair, custom LoRAs, control nets, bespoke ComfyUI graphs, and thousands upon thousands of tightly steered iterations.

Then came compositing, lighting balance, physics corrections, artifact removal, and final finishing in Flame. We generated what felt like dailies – thousands of takes – then shaped them in the edit just as we would on any high-craft production. This wasn’t an AI trick. It was a film. And here’s the thing I wish more people understood: magic isn’t the technology. The magic is the team behind it, people who pushed, questioned, experimented, swore at broken models, solved impossible problems, and refused to stop until every frame felt cinematic.

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.”

Personally, I think it would have been simpler and more effective to have a camera crew and a director film some actors, perhaps incorporating some stock footage, rather than creating something that sounds both tedious and poorly executed. But I guess I’m just old-fashioned like that.