McDonald’s/Youtube
Fast-food giant backs down after controversy over AI-created ad. Coca-Cola almost ran over people with “transformer” trucks in an ad released shortly before.
Most people are embracing artificial intelligence (AI), but there are sectors that still fail dismally when they use it. One of them is the advertisingand even the biggest companies in the world are having difficulty pleasing consumers.
The Netherlands recently withdrew a new Christmas advertising campaign produced using AI, after a strong wave of criticism on social media. The video, created in partnership with the agency TBWA\Neboko and produced by The Sweetshop, was accused of being scary, artificial and alienating the audience instead of winning them over.
The ad, lasting around 45 seconds, was based on the idea that the Christmas season is “the worst time of the year” and illustrated this concept with a very accelerated succession of images generated by AI. In the scenes, humans and objects appeared with a “rubber” appearance, deformed, immersed in an aesthetic that the most attentive eye quickly identifies as originating from generative tools, which many described as an uncomfortable, strange experience. See for yourself:
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’
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Soon after publication, the comments surrounding the campaign turned out to be intensely negative. And it wasn’t just because of the visual result. The brand’s choice to use AI instead of hiring creative teams and real actors was the biggest point of contention. According to many of the comments, everything that appears in the ad could have been done by real professionals.
The fast-food giant even ended up turning off the video’s comments section and removing it from its platforms. Still, as expected, the ad copy continued to circulate online.
The producer Sweetshop initially responded with a defensive statement, according to , which has since been removed, in which it assured that it was not “an AI trick”, but rather a “film”. The company emphasizes that its team spent seven weeks and “barely slept” working on the material generated, with prompts improved, to transform it into something “genuinely cinematic”. For many critics, however, the explanation only reinforced the idea that time and resources were invested in an aesthetic that the public, in the end, almost unanimously rejected.
Recently, it also published an ad with artificial intelligence, which was promptly received in the same way: negative reviews after negative reviews.
Furthermore, it was full of “glitches“: company trucks changing shape, losing or gaining wheels, and even one of the trucks on a collision course with spectators, as can be seen at 0:50.
Also the company, through Pratik Thakar, global vice president and head of generative AI at Coca-Cola, came to defend itself: Coca-Cola wants to be a pioneer in AI advertising and not “wait for the technology to be 100% ready”, he said, quoted by .
