McDonald's Pulls Down AI-Generated Holiday Ad After Deluge of Mockery

[BootinUp]

"The future is here, and it's not looking good."
By Joe Wilkins

Published Dec 9, 2025 1:08 PM EST

Thanks to the rise in popularity of generative AI, mainstream companies like Coca-Cola and Google are jumping on the bandwagon to plop out new advertisements. There’s just one issue: pretty much everybody hates it.

This year, McDonald’s decided to get in on the corporate slopfest with a 45-second Christmas spot cooked up for its Netherlands division by the ad agency TBWANeboko. The entire thing is AI, and revolves around the thesis that the holiday season is the “most terrible time of the year.”

Humbug aside, the ad assaults the viewer with rapidly-changing scenes played out in AI’s typically nauseating fashion. Because most videos generated with AI tend to lose continuity after a handful of seconds, short and rapidly-changing scenes have become one of the key tells that the clip you’re watching is AI.

Similar to Coke’s 2025 Holiday ad, the McDonald’s spot is like a visual seizure, full of grotesque characters, horrible color grading, and hackneyed AI approximations of basic physics.

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/mcdonalds-ai-generated-commercial

[NJCher]

1. Saw the ad

Meant to be funny.

Not funny.

Grotesque.

The ad violates one of McD’s long time principles: don’t make fun of American customs. This ad crosses the line with the forced jocularity in the leering faces, the traffic scene, the creepy cookies..

Having been ad ad manager there, I am sure this was a controversial decision. The faction who promoted it just dead ended their careers.