When AI misses the holiday moment
In early December 2025, McDonald’s Netherlands released a Christmas commercial built largely with generative AI, produced by TBWA\Neboko in collaboration with The Sweetshop. The 45-second spot combined AI-generated imagery with a parody of a classic holiday song to show festive season frustrations and presenting McDonald’s as a refuge from seasonal chaos. However, within days, the company removed the ad from its official YouTube channel following widespread criticism of its tone and visuals.
Viewers on various social media platforms described the imagery as strange and disjointed, and many criticised the lack of human warmth in the storytelling. The ad was widely seen as lacking the emotional familiarity usually expected of this type of seasonal content.
This controversy reflects a broader pattern surrounding AI-led campaigns. Similar criticism has been levelled at Coca-Cola and Italian fashion house Valentino for their recent AI experiments, which were also deemed to be “cheap” or disconnected from their usual standards. These cases suggest that simply declaring AI use is not enough to convince audiences if the creative output feels off-brand or emotionally flat.
Critics argue that AI-driven production threatens traditional roles such as actors, production crews and visual effects teams, fuelling anxieties about the future of work in the creative industries. The Sweetshop responded that shaping the AI outputs still required weeks of manual refinement, renewing debate over whether AI genuinely reduces labour or primarily changes the nature of the required work.
Within advertising and branding, AI has been recently used to explore new creative directions, prototype ideas more quickly and keep production costs under tighter control. At the same time, AI-generated visuals could introduce artefacts and stylistic inconsistencies, which can result in scenes that may appear cold and emotionless, thus damaging brand perception (especially in contexts where sentiment is important, such as holiday advertising).
This story highlights a key strategic question: can AI be integrated into advertising in a way that genuinely strengthens storytelling and emotional engagement, or will audiences increasingly perceive AI-heavy campaigns as inauthentic?