Earlier this week, McDonald’s Netherlands unveiled a new commercial in time for the holiday season. The ad, which changes the words to “The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year” to “The Most Terrible Time Of The Year,” is entirely AI-generated. It depicts a bunch of holiday and winter-related mishaps, like burnt cookies and Santa’s sleigh struggling to find parking at some sort of store. There is also a set of totally Lynchian grandparents. And because Christmas is so terrible, you’re probably better off hiding out in a McDonald’s until January, the ad claims.
This advertisement was immediately and widely despised. The dislikes quickly outweighed the likes on the video, and the comments were shut off as of yesterday. This afternoon, Futurism reports that the video has been made private, making it, for all intents and purposes, gone from YouTube. (It’s still floating around on X and other social media sites, if you’re interested in seeing what all the fuss is about.)
The Sweetshop, the production company that TBWA\Neboko hired to make the ad, stood by the product as backlash mounted. “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,” The Sweetshop wrote in a statement (via 80LV). “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.” The company’s statement concludes with the assertion: “AI didn’t make this film. We did.” The Sweetshop doesn’t seem to have publicly commented since the video was made private.
