McDonald’s drops AI-generated ad for the holidays and everyone's saying the same thing about it

The festive season isn’t only about bright lights, grand dinners and holiday sparkle. It’s also the loudest, most competitive time on the marketing calendar. A time when brands come with the best they have got to make the long connection with people, heart-touching films, quirky outdoor ads and digital moments designed to pause your scrolling. But this year, McDonald's Netherlands’ Christmas commercial turned out so unsettling for people that the backlash started soon after, as we caught it through @CultureCrave on X. 

The ad premiered in the Netherlands as part of the Christmas campaign developed by TBWA\NEBOKO and according to the agency, it was meant to poke fun at the mismatch between glossy holiday perfection and real-life chaos. In a now-deleted Instagram post, they explained, “December is often presented as perfect, while the reality is usually far more chaotic… That truth shaped our new AI-driven campaign for @mcdonaldsnl, turning It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year into the most terrible time of the year,” per Daily Dot. 

They credited “an international collective of AI specialists at @thegardening.club” and Sweetshop directors MAMA for helping create McDonald’s’ first fully AI-produced commercial, per Daily Dot. But instead of festive mischief, the final product hit viewers like a bad dream, a holiday atmosphere that felt more eerie than charming. Soon after, McDonald’s Netherlands pulled the ad entirely, telling BBC News that the moment was “an important learning” as the company continued exploring “the effective use of AI.” Even the YouTube link is now unavailable, though the clip lives on through countless reposts by users who couldn’t stop talking about the bad AI ad. 

Many platforms on social media reposted the video before it was removed and the reaction was immediate from the viewers. On @CultureCrave's post on X, we found tweets that took a dig at the brand in the most humorous way. Some focused on the red flags they immediately recognized and some turned sarcastic. 

And then there was @TheColeBrewTv, summing up the mood in a single jab: “Poor babies they had to type prompts.”

@jefbanks missed the old McDonald's ads, "I’m old enough to remember when McDonald’s was the gold standard of advertising. This is just a terrible commercial."

The criticism also spread to other platforms quickly. A Reddit post by u/Sniff_The_Cat3 reposted a video with thoughts on the ad and why it had been taken down. u/Adventurous_Spray821 focused on one of the creators’ claims about the time spent on production, “I converted 5000 hours to days, getting about 210 days. That only makes things worse, as they basically claimed that it took them about 7 months to make this ad. Ain’t nobody believing that!” u/altheawilson89 shared that it is good that video has been removed, "it was a sh***y ad and they should be ashamed for releasing that slop.

Despite the jokes, not everyone was ready to dismiss the work entirely. In a statement quoted by Futurism, The Sweetshop’s chief executive Melanie Bridge defended the production and pushed back against the idea that the team simply fed lines into a model. She explained that the commercial took “seven weeks,” during which the team “hardly slept” and produced “thousands of takes – then shaped them in the edit just as we would on any high-craft production.” “This wasn’t an AI trick,” she said. “It was a film.”

Whether viewers agree remains another debate, but what’s clear is that McDonald’s has unintentionally become the latest case study in how quickly AI-driven creativity can turn into a blunder, especially when the internet gets to judge the results.

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