McDonald’s Netherlands decided to skip the traditional fuzzy-feel holiday commercial this year. Instead of snow-dusted cuteness and families pretending they all get along, the chain dropped a crazy AI ad that proudly calls December “The Most Terrible Time of the Year.” That’s worse than hearing the ice-cream machine is broken on a hot day.
The spot was cooked up (burnt, maybe) with TBWA\NEBOKO, The Sweetshop and the directing duo MAMA. They wanted exaggerated cartoon-like madness, a festive panic attack set to jingles. Exploding trees, burnt dinners and frantic shoppers. The goal was humor. But the reaction from audiences are mixed at best.
Some viewers couldn’t believe their eyes. One wrote, “Did they literally just splice together 6 second generations lol?” Another added, “Wow, will definitely NOT be going to McDonald’s this Christmas.” A personal favorite: “Visual slop to go along with the edible slop. Quite fitting actually.”
Others compared the ad to what other branches do. “The difference in how the Japanese branch and American branch advertise is so jarring. Japanese McDonalds constantly collabs with popular internet artists… even when they did an AI ad.” Another critic said, “I think this is bad for all the reasons that they didn’t want it to be bad.”
There’s also the bigger concern: using AI in creative work while the industry is already nervous about jobs and copyrights. One viewer summed up the fear perfectly: “The thing is that new models are coming out so quickly that a project that isn’t completed very quickly feels outdated when it is finished.”
Melanie Bridge, CEO of The Sweetshop, stands by the experiment. She insisted to LBB that it “wasn’t a ‘prompt and pray’ project,” explaining the script was designed for AI from day one because doing this scale in live-action would require “a monstrous budget and a freezing European winter shoot.” Wait, so McDonald’s doesn’t have money for big-budget ads?
We get what they tried to do. Christmas can be chaotic. But the glossy, slightly mushy visuals look like a storyboard that accidentally aired nationwide. If you’re promising the one calm place during the holidays is a McDonald’s, at least make the ad look like somewhere a person would willingly go.
AI slop ads really need to end.
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