McDonald’s Netherlands tried to flip Christmas with a fully AI-generated ad about how awful December is, then yanked it after the internet tore it apart.
📌 Key Takeaways
- McDonald’s Netherlands released a 45 second, fully AI generated Christmas ad built with generative video tools.
- The spot showed chaotic, gloomy holiday disasters and told viewers to “hide out” at McDonald’s instead.
- Viewers blasted the visuals as uncanny and ugly, with glitchy bodies and “nightmare fuel” faces.
- After heavy backlash, McDonald’s shut off YouTube comments, then removed or privated the ad.
- The production team defended the work as intensely human-made, saying AI was a tool, not the author.
How McDonald’s Turned Christmas Into “The Most Terrible Time Of The Year”
The campaign follows a stressed, AI generated Santa and a series of unlucky families stumbling through the holidays, set to a reworked jingle that calls December “the most terrible time of the year.”
Scenes jump rapidly from traffic jams to tangled fairy lights and botched skating trips, before suggesting that escaping all this chaos by hiding out in McDonald’s is the sensible move. The tone leans hard into cynicism instead of warmth or nostalgia.
Why Viewers Called The AI Ad Creepy And Mean-Spirited
What might have landed as absurdist humour instead looked unsettling on screen. The ad’s people are AI composites, with off-kilter limbs, rubbery physics, and faces that slide just out of sync with reality.
Critics piled on screenshots of jelly-like legs mid-fall and weirdly lit, plasticky crowds, calling the whole thing “creepy” and “depressing” rather than relatable. Some viewers went further, arguing that pairing glitchy AI humans with a message about hating Christmas tipped into pure brand misjudgement.
- Glitchy limbs and warped bodies during slapstick falls
- Over saturated, inconsistent colours that scream “AI render”
- Faces that look almost human, then suddenly not
- A bleak script about hating Christmas, sold as a joke
How The Internet Reacted And Why The Ad Vanished
Online reaction turned hostile within days. The YouTube upload drew a flood of negative comments and more dislikes than likes, even though it only racked up around 20,000 views before disappearing.
Viewers attacked both the aesthetics and the idea of using AI to replace people in a big Christmas spot. One Instagram comment summed up the mood with, “Please bring back people doing things again.”
One of the viewers on social media commented:
“Fake footage for fake food.”
As criticism mounted, McDonald’s first shut off comments on the video, then removed or privated it entirely. Copies continue to circulate on social platforms, where the ad is already being used as a cautionary meme about what happens when brands chase AI hype too hard.
The Production Team Says “AI Didn’t Make This Film. We Did.”
Behind the scenes, the spot was not a cheap text prompt experiment. The creative agency and production house say around ten specialists worked full-time for five to seven weeks, generating thousands of takes through an in-house AI pipeline before cutting them together like a traditional shoot.
In a public defence, the director and production leads argued that the project still demanded serious human craft, from storyboarding to editing, and that AI was simply another tool in the process.
“This wasn’t an AI trick. It was a film. AI didn’t make this film. We did.” — Melanie Bridge, Chief Executive, Production Partner
That framing did little to calm critics who see the piece as both creatively weak and symbolically tone deaf at a time when many illustrators, directors, and crew already feel squeezed by automation and budget cuts.
What This Backfire Signals For AI In Advertising
The McDonald’s spot did not land in a vacuum. It follows a widely mocked AI Christmas campaign from a major drinks brand earlier this season, and a year of glitchy AI out-of-home experiments that sparked similar unease.
Together, they highlight a pattern. AI can cut shoots, time and cost on paper, yet audiences react badly when the tech is used to mimic realistic humans, especially around emotional moments like holidays. The more a brand leans into “look, no humans,” the more people seem to push back.
For marketers and agencies, this campaign now reads like a playbook of what not to do: combine harsh negativity, uncanny CG people and a self-congratulatory making-of story, then be surprised when nobody wants the end result. The lesson is less “never use AI” and more “do not forget the human response you are designing for.”
Conclusion
McDonald’s Netherlands set out to make a tongue-in-cheek Christmas commercial about how stressful December really is, using AI to push the visuals into surreal territory. Instead, it created a campaign people mostly found ugly, joyless, and oddly hostile to the very season it was meant to sell.
As brands sprint into AI-generated advertising, this backlash is a clear warning. Viewers can spot the seams; they care about how work is made, and if the emotional tone feels off, no amount of cutting-edge tooling will save an ad from the skip button.
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10th December 2025
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