It 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.
How does this kind of work take 7 weeks for 10 people?
10 animators could hand-draw every frame of a 44 second ad in that time. They could spend an hour on each frame, completely trash and redo the entire commercial, take an extra week for meetings and rework, and still have time to spare.
Complete tangent but “in lockstep” really seems to be doing the rounds again as corpo speak. It honestly annoys me but I can’t explain why - maybe because they’re not a military but an ad production company.
Having 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.
No 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.
> 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.
What 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.
What 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.
It’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.
> 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.
On 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.
As 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...
> 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?
> Who cares
If it has mistakes and is overall a shitty ad I imagine it'll be less persuasive in getting people to buy the product. I have to imagine someone cares very much about that.
OMG! 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!"
This 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.
It'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.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 71.2 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-YwjXEVGo8
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-ge...
[1] 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-Sh...
10 animators could hand-draw every frame of a 44 second ad in that time. They could spend an hour on each frame, completely trash and redo the entire commercial, take an extra week for meetings and rework, and still have time to spare.
Was the concept created by AI?
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.
This isn't really a field where you get points for effort. The end product was extremely bad, which is ultimately what matters.
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...
I think this sums up the feeling about this new era. Indeed, who cares?
Empathy is the biggest sin according to our new elites.
By the end of the day when you don’t care enough, you may finally start enjoying this AI slop.
> Who cares
If it has mistakes and is overall a shitty ad I imagine it'll be less persuasive in getting people to buy the product. I have to imagine someone cares very much about that.
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!"
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.
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.