Flux 2
“Ba da ba ba ba.”
Few advertising assets are as deeply embedded in popular culture as McDonald’s jingle.
It doesn’t just identify a brand; it evokes a feeling that’s been reinforced for decades — familiarity, predictability, comfort without complication.
You know what McDonald’s is before you see a logo or a menu.
You know how it’s supposed to make you feel.
When everything else goes wrong, the golden arches stand strong
Which is why McDonald’s Netherlands AI-generated Christmas ad landed with such confusion.
Viewers criticized the tone.
The ad was pulled.
A McDonald’s executive later described the episode as “an important learning,” a phrase that suggested they will do everything except understanding why the ad failed.
The ad failed because it didn’t understand the emotional space it was entering, or the expectations that come with Christmas advertising.
That kind of misread tends to linger longer than a simple creative failure.
A Holiday Premise That Never Quite Found Its Footing
For decades, the recipe for a successful holiday advertisement was expensive but simple: capture a genuine human moment.
It required lighting crews freezing in the snow, directors coaxing the perfect smile from a child actor, and food stylists making a turkey look steaming hot.
It was messy, logistical work, but it yielded the currency of the season: warmth.
The pitch for Generative Artificial Intelligence was seductive.
It promised the ability to conjure the warmth without the cost of reality.
Why pay for a film crew when a prompt engineer could dream up a winter wonderland for a fraction of the cost?
Why rely on the unpredictability of human actors when an algorithm could generate the "perfect" face?
Executives at Coca-Cola and McDonald’s Netherlands bought into this vision, believing they were pioneering a new era of efficiency and innovation.
Instead, they walked unsuspecting consumers right into a digital nightmare, proving that while AI can generate pixels, it cannot generate a soul.
On paper, the concept wasn’t outrageous.
The holidays are stressful.
They’re crowded, expensive, emotionally exhausting.
McDonald’s positioned itself as a place of escape.
A place that is familiar and comfortable when everything else feels overwhelming.
Plenty of holiday ads have started from a similar observation. The difference is how they resolve it.
Traditionally, stress is acknowledged as a prelude to relief: a family reconnects, a routine restores order, a moment of warmth cuts through the noise.
In McDonald’s case, the ad lingered in the chaos.
Its AI-generated imagery came off as exaggerated and uncanny, paired with a darkly ironic twist on “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.”
Instead of inviting viewers in, the ad seemed to stand back from the season and look down on it.
For a brand whose identity has long been built on warm emotions that disconnect was striking.
When the Conversation Turned to AI
As the campaign was pulled, attention quickly shifted to the role of generative AI. Critics were quick the label the ad as pure “AI slop”.
The studio behind the ad pushed back.
This wasn’t a single-prompt experiment, they argued.
It involved weeks of work, thousands of generated assets, and significant human involvement.
The ad wasn’t lazy. It was deliberate.
That defense, however, only made matters worse.
If this was the result of careful planning and iteration, then the problem wasn’t execution, it was the agency viewing this ad as somehow capturing the holiday spirit.
And that is a problem much deeper than AI slop.
Coca-Cola and the Familiar Feeling That Wasn’t There
McDonald’s wasn’t alone in discovering this tension.
Coca-Cola also released another AI remix of its iconic “The Holidays are Coming” ad.
Last year audiences were disappointed with the AI version of their ad making it unclear why they would want to repeat the same mistake.
The images were unmistakably Coca-Cola.
The colors, compositions, and references were all there.
But the feeling of warmth that has defined the brand’s holiday presence for decades is not there compared with the iconic original ad.
In both cases, AI didn’t introduce something new.
Instead it produced something familiar, but it came off as soulless.
Looking Ahead
What these campaigns reveal is a quiet but consequential misunderstanding about what AI does well.
Generative systems are excellent at recognizing and reproducing patterns.
They know what a Christmas ad looks like.
They can assemble the visual language of the season quickly and convincingly.
What they currently fail to capture is why certain images endure
Holiday advertising is unusually sensitive to tone.
It operates on a narrow emotional bandwidth, where sincerity and emotional pull matters more than cleverness.
When brands lean too heavily on AI to recreate holiday magic, the result is something that is technically correct but feels emotionally wrong.
Part of AI’s appeal to advertisers is obvious: speed, flexibility, cost control.
A holiday campaign isn’t something you quietly test and refine.
It’s a public statement, released into a moment of heightened emotion and expectation.
When it misses, there’s no room to recover.
Whatever efficiencies McDonald’s gained by using AI were quickly eclipsed by the decision to pull the ad altogether.
In that sense, the campaign wasn’t just a creative misstep.
It was a reminder that not every advertising problem is a production problem that needs an “accelerated” solution.
Why AI Video Still Feels Slightly Off
There’s also a more practical explanation for the unease these ads provoke.
AI-generated video still struggles with the subtleties that make cinematic storytelling work: continuity of character, micro-expressions, pacing, and the small imperfections that signal intention rather than imitation.
It often lands close enough to realism to feel unsettling, particularly in emotionally charged contexts.
Audiences may not articulate this in technical terms, but they feel it instinctively.
Something doesn’t connect.
The emotion doesn’t arrive.
The reaction to McDonald’s and Coca-Cola isn’t best understood solely as anti-AI sentiment.
Viewers are responding to the sense that AI is being used as a substitute for creative judgment.
The frustration is less ideological than emotional.
Holiday advertising asks audiences for trust.
When that trust is met with something that feels impersonal or oddly cynical, the response is swift.
McDonald’s called the pulled campaign “an important learning.”
It should be.
Not because AI failed, but because it revealed something uncomfortable: without an emotional pull, even the most creative holiday ads will fall flat.
AI will reshape advertising and entertainment.
But the companies that succeed won’t be the ones that generate the most content or move the fastest.
They’ll be the ones that remember why stories work at all
For now, meaning still isn’t something you can automate.
And when a holiday ad forgets that, people notice.