8 ms·
McDonald's pulls AI Christmas ad after backlash
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abRie4vAvJ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abRie4vAvJ4
- Fricken 10mo agoThis is the slop that BBC failed to show you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-YwjXEVGo8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-YwjXEVGo8
- HardwareLust 10mo agoHoly shit that's awful.
- jackdoe 10mo agobut cheap
- BoredPositron 10mo agoThe agency said they spent over 5000 hours just in the execution.
- gdulli 10mo agoI haven't watched it but I'm sure they also either said or implied McDonalds is worthwhile on some level so we can pump the brakes on taking them at their word.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- creata 10mo agoIs there any doubt that the agency is lying?
- bediger4000 10mo agoNo. Advertising is all lies, so by any system of logic, as agencies are habitual, consistent liars.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- aitchnyu 10mo agoI've seen individual AI fans create these in minutes, hardly '"seven weeks" where the team "hardly slept" and created "thousands of takes"'.
- eurekin 10mo agoOh, that can also mean they were out partying using the ad budgets funds :D
- amonith 10mo agoThe thing is, if you want AI output to be heavily directed, which is probably the case here, I can imagine that thousands of random takes had to be made to make the damn thing follow the director's imagination. If you don't care too much about the output you can make these very quickly, yeah.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- josefritzishere 10mo agoThis is worse than what the average college kid can do over a weekend. What garbage.
- crazygringo 10mo agoThat... doesn't bother me more than any other commercial. Commercials are mostly dumb. This is another pretty dumb one. It has clunky AI just like plenty of other commercials have clunky traditional VFX. Can't really see myself getting worked up about it? If AI frees up VFX artists so they can work on movies rather than commercials, I'm all for that.
- watwut 10mo ago> If AI frees up VFX artists so they can work on movies rather than commercials, I'm all for that. There are way more people who want to be movie VFX artists then positions. Artists do commercials, because it pays that is where jobs are. They would gladly do cool movies.
- crazygringo 10mo ago> There are way more people who want to be movie VFX artists then positions. Not good ones. Good VFX studios are actually a major blocker in movie production, because there aren't enough of them. And their only limit is the number of qualified artists available.
- watwut 10mo agoReally not. If the movie studios were willing to pay for that, there would be more studios. We are talking about very competitive field where employers call all the shots. You know how you recognize lack of workers in an area? By high salaries, low competitiveness and very good working conditions.
- aswegs8 10mo agoDon't get it either. LGTM. Sure, it's no high budget (pre-AI) Coca Cola Christmas Ad, but it's not disturbing or particularly bad. Feels like people are just jumping on the "AI ads bad" bandwagon.
- sssilver 10mo ago> If AI frees up VFX artists so they can work on movies rather than commercials, I'm all for that. This isn’t how it works. Excel didn’t free up bookkeepers to become CFOs. Digital photography didn’t free up photo lab technicians to become cinematographers. The person who in 1970 would have been an accountant at Ford Motor Company with a pension and a mortgage is now, displaced by Excel, working at two burger joints to make ends meet, with no realistic path to anything better. The VFX artists will follow in the exact same footsteps. The shareholders will keep the difference, as they have time and again.
- rsynnott 10mo agoThere's a link to the ad in the article (the linked text "The Advert"). It is, indeed, astonishingly bad, even for AI slop.
- OhioMan2943 10mo agoExecutive dysfunction
- chromehearts 10mo agoMcSlop
- macintux 10mo agoIt seems like a statement from The Sweetshop, who made the ad, has also been pulled. This piece links to a Futurism article[0], which in turn links to "an incredibly defensive statement"[1] from the ad agency. > “For seven weeks, we hardly slept, with up to 10 of our in-house AI and post specialists at The Gardening Club [our in-house AI engine] working in lockstep with the directors,” Sweetshop’s CEO wrote. (Sounds more like sweatshop than sweetshop, but I digress.) However, that "defensive statement" link is broken, and I see no sign of it on the linked site, but I did find this older lamentation[2] from The Sweetshop regarding AI, or more specifically regarding the attitude that AI should allow you to cut costs and fire people. > Being asked to cut 20–30% of creative costs and labour under the banner of ‘AI’ is unimaginative at best, and corrosive at worst. It drains the value of human creativity and concentrates it in fewer and fewer hands, hollowing out the very industry it claims to improve. [0] https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/mcdonalds-ai-generated-commercial https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/mcdonalds-ai-ge... [1] https://lbbonline.com/news/melanie-bridge-sweetshop-the-gardening-club-mcdonalds https://lbbonline.com/news/melanie-bridge-sweetshop-the-gard... (missing page, and the Wayback Machine doesn't have a copy) [2] https://lbbonline.com/news/Damn-The-Race-to-the-Bottom-AI-Shouldnt-Be-Cost-Cutting-Machine https://lbbonline.com/news/Damn-The-Race-to-the-Bottom-AI-Sh...
- dfxm12 10mo agoSeems like one could have created a cheaper, higher quality ad with real actors. Of course, real actors have unions and part of the point of AI is to make labor weaker.
- falcor84 10mo agoAs I see it, the purpose of AI is the same as the purpose of every technology ever since the hand axe - to reduce labor. Humans have a strong drive to figure out ways to achieve more with less effort. Obviously there are higher order effects, but same as we wouldn't expect the Homo Erectus to stop playing with stone tools because they'd disrupt their society (which of course they did), I don't understand why we should decide to halt technological progress now.
- scandox 10mo agoAs bad as this is in conception and execution what I see is a blip on a path towards the new normal.
- ablation 10mo agoFeels like a trial balloon. Yes, this one went badly. It was awful slop. But there will be another. And another. And I feel like for most people catching an ad on TV, the realisation that AI made it will decrease or won't bother them over time. The frog will be boiled.
- xnorswap 10mo agoThose "trial balloons" happened years ago, this is only news because it was pulled and because it was a pretty bad advert anyway. Coca-cola had some backlash for its use of AI in adverts ages ago and carried on anyway. There's tons of gen-AI in adverts and most of it isn't newsworthy. The frog is stewed.
- ourmandave 10mo agoIf they can get to "normal". This was so uncanny valley and disjointed it was like a preview to a horror movie.
- nobleach 10mo agoPerhaps. Watching my GenZ kids react to AI commercials during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, there was general revulsion. It seems many of them are seeking authenticity not uncanny. I know this would be an anathema in a board room where the cost of producing an amazing commercial via AI would make a C-suite sparkle with delight. No paid actors? No sound stage? No reshoots? And yet, my kids reject it. It's odd. This is coming from a guy who loved watching frogs belch out the name of a beer company in the 90s....
- phatfish 10mo agoThis is going to end in an plague of video marketing material, the sort of professional looking creation that is too expensive currently to get wrong so the same advert is shown for months and sometimes repeated yearly. Big brands are going to push multiple different adverts per week to a single market to see what sticks. Get ready for the assault.
- theturtle 10mo ago[dead]
- erikig 10mo agoHaving spent enough time with marketing and PR folks, I really wouldn't be surprised if this supposed backlash is overhyped as a way to get more people interested in seeing the ad.
- zemo 10mo agothey want more people to see it so they removed it from YouTube?
- swarnie 10mo agoI've encountered far too many people who actively seek out ads or look forward to them, people I usually respect, its baffling.
- edwin2 10mo agothey probably understand it’s impossible (or very hard) to fully delete viral content and that it’d get re-shared PLUS they double dip as they get extra search traffic for their brand from people trying to find the video the forbidden fruit is more enticing
- Ekaros 10mo agoIf I was cynical marketer I would say make a couple of copies. And then pull it from your channel. Then spread those on social media.
- DonHopkins 10mo agoIf I was a cynical troll I would generate something ghastly, spread it on social media, and claim it was from McDonalds. https://www.facebook.com/reel/1184701899747516 https://www.facebook.com/reel/1184701899747516
- kakacik 10mo agoOutrage and clickbait has more than one form and it works surprisingly well on masses, part of orange mans success story. Just look at us discussing it, it wouldn't happen with (much more costly) normal MCD ad.
- lizardking 10mo agoBeyond the critique of the AI slop, what a rotten message that was. If their goal was to bum me out, they were successful.
- jqpabc123 10mo agoMickey D's disses Christmas. Was the concept created by AI?
- hasbot 10mo agoNo way anyone wants to hang out at McDonald's. If they're trying to make McDonald's a third space they need to do some remodeling first. Restaurants aren't warm and appealing; they're hard and easy to clean.
- onionisafruit 10mo ago[flagged]
- fidotron 10mo agoThe one near me is always full of old people just hanging out. They use it in a similar way to many kids with starbucks, but they speak to each other instead of using laptops.
- koakuma-chan 10mo agoEvery McDonald's in North America I have been in had homeless people sleeping in it. I also actually worked at McDonald's and we would have to call ambulance every now and then because someone got high and passed out or something in the washroom.
- crazygringo 10mo agoThen you've probably only been to/worked at McDonald's in the built-up parts of major cities. McDonald's in the suburbs and more rural areas and smaller cities are quite pleasant. Spacious, clean, just local folks. If your local McDonald's has a homeless person problem, then all your local fast food franchises do. It's a social services problem, not a McDonald's problem.
- freedomben 10mo agoExactly my experience. I've been to a lot of McDonald's everywhere from rural to old inner city, and the difference is Stark. The more rural locations tend to be clean and relatively comfortable and enjoyable to be in. The inner city locations tend to be dirty, crowded, and generally not very pleasant to be in. And it's not just McDonald's, as you mentioned. I've observed the exact same thing with Wendy's and many other restaurants as well. There are of course plenty of exceptions. It's perfectly possible to find a dirty uncomfortable restaurant in a rural area, and it's also not difficult to find a nice comfortable place in the inner city. But generally speaking the above is what I have observed most
- MisterTea 10mo ago> As quoted in Futurism, she said the production process took "seven weeks" where the team "hardly slept" and created "thousands of takes - then shaped them in the edit just as we would on any high-craft production". How else are you going to justify what I assume is a 5-6 figure invoice for essentially doing nothing. > "This wasn't an AI trick," she said. "It was a film." Unfortunately you can't trick us with this nonsense. I am pretty sure no editing software was used beyond hammering on a prompt for a weekend.
- camillomiller 10mo ago>>This wasn't an AI trick," she said. "It was a film." Even this statement reeks of chatGPT.
- ablation 10mo agoI must say, my first thought was ChatGPT's signature writing style coming through loud and clear in that statement.
- camillomiller 10mo agoApparently the reason why chatGPT really likes the “it’s not just x, it’s y” structure is its overuse in marketing copy. Maybe this marketer actually has internalized that structure for real.
- onionisafruit 10mo agoWhat is especially bad about this ad? To me it seems no worse than the infernal Paintin Manning ad from last year or the State Farm Megan Trainor ad this year. If this was on rotation in NFL games it wouldn’t make me scramble for the mute button any faster than other ads.
- bavarianbob 10mo agoI thought similarly to you, until I saw it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abRie4vAvJ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abRie4vAvJ4
- nixass 10mo agoI still cannot see the bad part
- dymk 10mo agoI am legitimately sorry
- alamortsubite 10mo agoHave you ever ridden a bike over a canal? The ad was pushed in front of a lot of people who have. I thought it was creepy throughout, but I can't believe they used that clip up front.
- NetMageSCW 10mo ago“a lot of people” - citation needed.
- alamortsubite 10mo agoYou realize it was a Dutch ad, correct?
- array_key_first 10mo agoYou have to turn your monitor on, silly!
- jumpocelot 10mo agoWhat is the actual complaint here? Are people demanding commercials be beautiful? Before being AI slop, it is marketing slop. Why are they demanding 'soul' from an ad in 2025? Everything in this late-stage capitalist landscape is slop. They could have filmed it with real actors (or just reprised a spot from 15 years ago) and it wouldn't make any difference.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- input_sh 10mo agoBecause it's the TV yelling at you something along the lines of "Hey look, we replaced the creativity of dozens of people with this shitty result from a prompt, your job is next." The fact that it's so bad that it obviously doesn't adhere to any sort of quality standards we expect from humans is just adding an insult to injury. It tells people "AI doesn't even need to be better at your job than you to replace you."
- em-bee 10mo agoAI never needed to be better, it only needs to be cheaper.
- rsynnott 10mo agoCompanies generally want their ads to not be horribly off-putting. > They could have filmed it with real actors (or just reprised a spot from 15 years ago) and it wouldn't make any difference. I mean, it was conceptually bad to start with, but also it has a lot of unsettling AI video stuff (in particular, broken physics) that you wouldn't get with a real ad.
- pryelluw 10mo agoIt’s just a bad ad. People don’t want to hear a multinational corporation singing about Christmas being shitty. Whatever ad company made this should be forced to work retail during the season.
- brazukadev 10mo agoIf the budget was USD10k it is actually good.
- rsynnott 10mo ago> As quoted in Futurism, she said the production process took "seven weeks" where the team "hardly slept" and created "thousands of takes - then shaped them in the edit just as we would on any high-craft production". This isn't really a field where you get points for effort. The end product was extremely bad, which is ultimately what matters.
- dukeyukey 10mo agoMcDonald's championing the labour theory of value is a new one.
- dymk 10mo agoOn top of it being visually unappealing, I hate ads that take the misanthrope route to appeal to people’s worst nature. Wow, you hate Christmas, thanks McD.
- bgbntty2 10mo agoAs much as I hate McDonalds and think they should go bankrupt, and as much as I hate ads in general, I enjoyed this one. It's funny, it has lots of small clips of things going wrong one after the other. Compared to the standard corporate ads with a long family- and Jesus-oriented message that pretend to give some significance to Christmas besides how it affects their profits, this one is bold and different. Who cares if it's made by AI and has obvious mistakes? It's not the new Star Wars movie where it's expected to focus on VFX issues. It's an ad - a 30 second clip that will run for a while to get people to buy products. If you can make an ad with AI for less money, why do it without AI? As for the message - we need more of this. It's kind of a taboo to hate Christmas, but I loathe it and everything about it. And so do many people. Maybe they won't say that in the office or around religious family members, but we do exist. You can't escape the shitty Christmas jingles that start in late November in almost all stores. You can't escape The tacky decorations, especially the blinking lights. If you mention the wasteful spending of taxpayer money on city decorations, people look at you as if you're crazy. You have to fight the implied obligation to participate in the celebration and to exchange gifts; having to tell people not to buy me anything. And the religious aspect of it, even though it started as a pagan holiday - people showing off how Christian they are even though a lot of them only remember their faith in twice a year. And finally, the commercialization of it - corporations pretending to care about it while trying to make everyone buy more products...
- IAmBroom 10mo agoIt's funny, but shitty in attitude. It makes a great viral parody. It does not sell hamburgers. That poster of a duck with a sledgeghammer getting ready to "PRESS ANY KEY" made me laugh, but IBM didn't put it out. And to your point about AI: yeah, irrelevant. The ad sucks regardless.
- bgbntty2 10mo agoI agree it's not an effective ad for most people and will likely damage their brand. Shitty ad from a business perspective. One more reason to like it.
- HelloUsername 10mo ago
- IAmBroom 10mo agoOMG! The song is literally called "The Most Terrible Time of the Year"! They managed to say something disheartening to everyone on Earth except first-act Scrooges and Grinches. Doubt Ebenezier ever set foot in a McDonald's, and Grinch never left his mountaintop home, so... [Yes, I know not everyone celebrates Christmas, but that song title is just a massive dump on your day, regardless.] What's their next marketing step? "Everything causes cancer, so you might as well get it from McDonald's!"
- ErigmolCt 10mo agoThe song title basically ensured the audience would bounce before the uncanny eyeballs even appeared
- sublinear 10mo agoThis is one of those moments that will look silly in the future. The ad sucks because it's cynical and poorly made. People would have complained on this basis alone. The ad also sucks because current generative AI is mass plagiarism. I am pretty sure all this nuance will be lost on people of the future though. Even right now video ads don't reach audiences like they used to. Maybe that will be another layer for people to fail to wrap their heads around and laugh about.
- ErigmolCt 10mo agoConsumers have a surprisingly good nose for when something was made to save time instead of to say something meaningful
- ekjhgkejhgk 10mo agoHow do you explain that an ad agency gets a contract from macdonalds and goes cheap on it? Is it greed or is it stupidity?
- joshstrange 10mo agoIt's a bad ad and the AI just makes it worse. The song doesn't rhyme well, the lyrics doesn't make much sense (they feel very forced), the things they portray are mostly unrealistic/exaggerated, and the cherry on top is that McDonalds is somehow a respite from the chaos of Christmas. I've never once in my life thought of McD as somewhere comforting to go. It's just a bad ad period. Also, no one wants a bad (probably also AI-generated) song about how terrible Christmas is. I'm not saying it's not terrible but no one wants a song about it.
- orloffm 10mo agoIt might be comforting in Europe sometimes. Some standalone McDonalds in Poland are very nice and comfortable.
- b3ing 10mo agoOther than the clips/scenes being short I couldn't tell too much that it was AI.
- JSR_FDED 10mo agoIt seems that when you’re selling fast food you’re in a world very far away from the one where livelihoods are being threatened by AI
- lbreakjai 10mo agoNot if your customer base can't afford to eat your food because they lost their jobs to AI.
- JSR_FDED 10mo agoJust watched it, the uncanny valley is a perfect match for their simulacra of food.
- jmclnx 10mo agoWhat can I say, I thought it was funny. But seeing it over and over could get annoying.
- ComplexSystems 10mo agoI am as tired of AI slop as everyone else but I think the backlash to this is way too exaggerated. Commercials are already "slop." There is no expectation of quality at all. The average Christmas commercial involves a bunch of elves singing "Taking Care of Business" while dancing in front of office supplies. This commercial sucked because nobody wants to hear "it's the most terrible time of year." I don't really care if they used AI.
- port11 10mo agoI think this one was especially bad because a massive corporation can't be arsed to do better. Like, Apple exaggerates a lot on their advertising, but at least there's some heart to it. (Coming from someone that doesn't like Apple.)
- danielbln 10mo agoUnless they do an ad where they literally crush creativity into a thin slab, an ad they had to later apologize for. Pepperage Farm remembers.
- ronsor 10mo agoPeople care way too much about this. Ads suck, in general. They're slop whether a human or an AI made it, and I don't want or care about them regardless.
- danielbln 10mo agoSo don't. But if mega corps want to juice our brains with their slop, to the degree that it's difficult to escape it, then we should also be able to sneer at the ads that miss the mark even more than usual.
- ronsor 10mo agoYou're foolishly giving them attention. Marketing teams know this. If an ad is bad, it's better to ignore it and not write news articles about some marketing-fabricated controversy. Now you're thinking about McDonalds, which is what they wanted! They don't actually expect you to buy a burger tomorrow because of this.
- ricardobeat 10mo agoFor some reason dutch advertising agencies went all-in on AI. There are tons of local commercials using the most terrible generated content and voiceovers.
- lofaszvanitt 10mo agoIf an RNG god exists, it will manifest soon, thanks to genAI, lol.
- Izkata 10mo ago> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abRie4vAvJ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abRie4vAvJ4 Several of the scenes in here are extremely similar to one from a year or two ago, which I think was to the same song.
- Shorel 10mo agoIt's not only a bad use of AI, as it has been discussed in other comments here. The entire idea of the ad is Grinch-worthy. It was conceived and directed by someone who hates the season. It makes you want to close the browser, not going out to eat.
- kurtis_reed 10mo agoNever mind the AI aspect, the message "Christmas sucks so hang out at McDonald's over the holiday period" is wack
- classified 10mo agoWeenies with no sense of humor. I found the ad hilarious, even though no ad on Earth could lure me to McDonald's.
- ch_fr 10mo agoWhy's it so mean spirited? I don't see that many ads, but the few I've seen lately are just insulting. Apple intelligence: "why try to make an effort for others?" McDonalds germany: "Christmas sucks actually, but you know what doesn't?" Great sample size of 2 I know... still enough to make me wonder if ad agencies are just playing a game of chicken between themselves to see who can spit on the face of customers the most before they realize they're being spit on. McDonald's case is pretty funny, because their JP branch on social media is on a streak of well-received PR stunts where they just grab whoever made a popular song/meme over the years and pay them to redo it as an ad (+ releasing an original song for their moon-viewing line of product that I do enjoy).
- jrdnpsnc 10mo agoP.T. Barnum once said, “There's no such thing as bad publicity” a lot of folks talk about it, so, I am sure, somehwere some marketing guy is being congratulated
- aklemm 10mo agoNobody wants it, and we all have a sense of the dark future ahead. Why they think we would think this is an acceptable way to sell burgers is crazy.
- MarkusWandel 10mo agoWho cares if it's AI made or not. It's funny even as it is offensive to many. One thing I've always wondered, with outrage over ads like this, would this (old) ad now be considered funny or offensive? https://youtu.be/dBqhIVyfsRg?si=WQ44V1CXuuFMGnca https://youtu.be/dBqhIVyfsRg?si=WQ44V1CXuuFMGnca
- anders35 10mo ago[dead]