It’s a disquieting new holiday tradition: a major corporation that should know not to dunk its reputation in the sewer celebrates the holidays by releasing a punishing, demonic commercial made with the latest batch of AI doohickeys.
This time, the perpetrator is McDonald’s:
McDonald’s has released an AI-generated Christmas ad The studio behind it says they ‘hardly slept’ for several weeks while writing AI prompts and refining the shots — ‘AI didn’t make this film. We did’ Comments have been turned off on YouTube
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— Culture Crave 🍿 (@culturecrave.co) December 8, 2025 at 11:19 AM
It’s about how much the holiday season sucks. Get it? It’s also genuinely hard to sit through because at every level from the subtle to the screechingly obvious, it looks and sounds all wrong.
Everyone hates it. Everyone. For instance, I disagree with Matt Walsh about just about everything, but folks, Matt Walsh is right:
I don’t care if it wasn’t AI. Making your ad all about calling Christmas the most terrible time of the year is a bigger problem. Gfy @McDonalds
— FreshOutOfPatience (@noname131252) December 10, 2025
According to Adforum, where a full video of the ad is still being hosted, it was commissioned by a firm called TBWA\NEBOKO in the Netherlands, presumably for the Dutch market. But the original YouTube channel that hosted the ad has already taken it private.
According to a post on the site 80 Level, the studio that produced this for TBWA/NEBEKO is called The Sweetshop, and it released a puzzling statement (apparently also now deleted) that reads like it was confused about why there was a backlash:
“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. Every shot travelled through a rigorously engineered toolchain: real Google Earth plates, advanced style-transfer, pixel-level photo repair, custom LoRAs, control nets, bespoke ComfyUI graphs, and thousands upon thousands of tightly steered iterations.
Then came compositing, lighting balance, physics corrections, artefact removal, and final finishing in Flame. 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. And here’s the thing I wish more people understood: magic isn’t the technology. The magic is the team behind it, people who pushed, questioned, experimented, swore at broken models, solved impossible problems, and refused to stop until every frame felt cinematic.
I don’t see this spot as a novelty or a cute seasonal experiment. To me, it’s evidence of something much bigger: that when craft and technology meet with intention, they can create work that feels genuinely cinematic. So no – AI didn’t make this film. We did.”
People weren’t upset because using AI is cheating. They were reacting to a bad commercial. This might be overkill, but I’ve watched this thing a few dozen times now, and here’s what’s wrong with it for the benefit of the folks who made it:
The jingle is a parody of the holiday standard “It’s The Most Wonderful Time of the Year” that sounds like it was made by prompting a music generator to be grouchy about Christmas. Rather than a cute ditty, it produced something discordant and unexpectedly halting that breaks away from the original melody and meter and meanders down unsatisfying lyrical rabbit holes.
Few if any of the scenarios produce any feeling of recognition. I suppose a lot of this is because they’re AI generations, but it’s also because the situations aren’t relatable. For a montage like this, each clip should play out a scenario from a familiar holiday gripe. Who has ever cheerfully wassailed in gale force winds? Who has battled another shopper on Black Friday over a generic teddy bear? Who can relate to the guy trying to pedal up an icy slope in a combination pedicab-wheelbarrow with a 12-foot Christmas tree sticking out? Even if you’re Dutch, I can’t imagine this makes sense.
At 0:20, the diners at the Christmas feast with the centerpiece on fire appear to be having a great time, and seem disappointed by someone putting it out with a fire extinguisher. At 0:30, the cat that jumps onto the tree doesn’t seem to pull the tree down. It looks more like the tree is rotating downward on a hinge like the gate in a parking garage. The AI can’t seem to decide if the couple at 0:36 is inside the cozy interior of a McDonald’s or outside in a bitterly cold rainstorm.
But moreover, this message is just off the mark for 2025. This kind of unsubtle “bad attitude” humor was all the rage in the 90s, when a t-shirt could have a slogan like “Life sucks!” printed on it and people at beach town souvenir stores would spend millions on it. In fact, “It’s The Most Wonderful Time of the Year” was used to great effect 29 years ago in this Staples commercial from back-to-school season about a dad who hates his children, as was the style at the time:
While this ad is mean, it at least has people in it, and you can’t help but feel something when a human actor conveys an emotion successfully. AI cannot do this and never will.
I hope that helps. Merry Christmas!
