Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you.
Posted on 12/12/2025 10:36:27 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Be afraid, be very afraid. That’s what we’d been told in the advertising and commercial production industry. AI is coming for your job. It’ll be faster than you, more creative than you and certainly more cost-effective than you.
Well, if the McDonald’s new – but swiftly deleted – Christmas ad was anything to go by, we haven’t, for the moment, got too much to worry about.
The completely AI ad was produced for the Netherlands but thanks to YouTube, has been been met with a mix of ridicule and revulsion all over the world. Ridicule because its images are so badly rendered and revulsion because those images are also quite creepy and disturbing.
The response has been so overwhelmingly hostile that McDonald’s were forced to pull the ad after just three days – and their folly has cost them a fortune.
It may look like it was quickly knocked up in the bedroom of a tragic nerd with a laptop, but apparently not. Melanie Bridge, CEO of the Sweetshop, the production company responsible for it, was at great pains to stress that a huge amount of time – and therefore money – had gone into its creation.
Instead of keeping quiet and waiting for the storm to pass, she unwisely launched an impassioned defence of the ad and made things about a hundred times worse.
“For seven weeks, we hardly slept,” she said. “The hours that went into this job far exceeded a typical commercial shoot.” She then mentioned the “blood, sweat and tears” involved in completing it. Looking at the finished result, I can well believe there were tears.
What on earth were they thinking? The Sweetshop is a great production company – I’ve shot with them more than once – so how did they end up producing such a dreadful piece of work? Seven weeks would have been plenty of time to shoot it properly with things like cameras and actual human beings. Without AI, it may not have had the exaggerated violence and horrible scenarios but that would have considerably improved the final commercial.
In advertising there’s a golden triangle of “Good, Cheap and Quick.” It’s rare to find an ad that’s all three, but most can achieve at least one. The McDonald’s ad has the unenviable distinction of being none of them.
AI was supposed to take care of the “quick” and the “cheap” side of things but, judging by what Melanie Bridge had to say, this horror show was both expensive and slow.
Still, she deserves some credit for refusing to blame poor technology, saying, “AI didn’t make this ad. We did. It was craft, just using different tools.” And I suppose she’s right: it’s just like painting a wall with a spoon.
Which leaves us with the third component of the golden triangle – the one marked “Good.”
This ad could have been beautifully shot by a visionary director or brought to life using stunning 3D animation and it would still never have been good. Its premise was to take Andy Williams’s Christmas favorite “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”– which would have cost McDonald’s a fortune to license – and change the lyrics to “It’s the Most Terrible Time of the Year.” To accompany this soundtrack are a sequence of gruesome, life-threatening mishaps to illustrate how awful Christmas is – so come to McDonald’s instead.
It’s hard to imagine a worse example of an advertiser failing to read the room. They know perfectly well that, for their loyal and largely mainstream customers, Christmas is not the most terrible time of the year.
Quite the opposite. For advertising to resonate with any audience, it must always be rooted in some kind of truth. Leaving aside the synthetic soullessness of the AI imagery, this ad was rooted in lies.
The cost to McDonald’s is almost incalculable. Apart from the eye-watering production and music licensing costs, the ad will have done enormous damage to their brand. They tried to attack people’s joy, pleasure and treasured beliefs. At Christmas, people don’t want processed burgers and fries. They want roast turkey, vegetables and all the trimmings. Because that – not McDonald’s – is the very definition of a happy meal.
|
|
Click here: to donate by Credit Card Or here: to donate by PayPal Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794 Thank you very much and God bless you. |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYz-5cL-BhA
Here’s another with comments:
McDonald’s Pulls ‘Creepy’ AI Christmas ad After Viewer Backlash: ‘As Real as Their Hamburgers’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpWCvItr55c
Was the message AI generated as well as the production?
Melanie Bridge, CEO of the Sweetshop, the production company responsible for it, was at great pains to stress that a huge amount of time – and therefore money – had gone into its creation.
Yup—this is a stunningly awful ad—on many levels.
Among many other issues—you really don’t want to show traffic accidents to advertise McDonalds.
If anything that would just make you dread getting on the road to go to McDonalds!
Appears YouTube has taken them down.
Wow! This ad was not only a technical fail using AI. It was a messaging fail - assaulting Christmas instead of focusing on the qualities people want to think of.
The one Barry Manilow wrote was cheesier than a cheeseburger, but better than the new one.
It think it’d be fun if McDonald’s re-ran some of these 70s ads (or updated it for the 2020’s and just pay Barry a royalty ). It would be cheaper.
Those people are destructive and think they're cute.
Love it!
The ad is off-balance. Lots of ads show the holiday madness and then end up with something warm and consoling. It’s the rush and chaos versus meaningful time spent with family and friends at a special time of year. This one was everything about Christmas (bad) versus time spent alone at McDonalds, where you are probably still depressed and eating your unhappy feelings away. Fail.
Story within the story: Everybody in Holland understands English.
IMHO, AI is about where motor vehicles were before the Model T- sometimes surprisingly good, elegant even; but usually less reliable than the old ways.
What I find interesting, well, actually to rant:
When young I did agricultural work, only white kid in the field sometimes; now a few workers and machinery do the job of dozens.
I worked in a warehouse; 14 of us were replaced by a semi-automated machine that could pick stock and put it right in front of the boxing folks.
I worked as a draftsman; CADD came in. Fortunatly I was able to learn it in time to keep my job, many didn’t.
I worked doing data entry. 55 of us were let go when OCR came in.
IN ALL THAT TIME I DO NOT RECALL *ONE* SOI-DISANT “CREATIVE” OR “KNOWLEDGE WORKER” GIVING THE SLIGHTEST DAMN.
The graphic artists, journalists, lyricists and poets, the “intellectuals” over and over again regarded it as the natural order of things that us untermenschen were replaced. Completely normal that those who worked up a sweat and stank at the end of the day, or toiled in repetitive clerical work were disposable and dispensable.
Now that memos, entire articles, pictures, poetry from haikus to epics, legal briefs, and corporate manuals can be created (admittedly not always or even often particularly well) by AI -*NOW* it is a crisis. The Übermenschen are threatened, so it matters.
F-’em.
I thought it was funny. Nothing to get your panties in a wad.
They could have made something really beautiful. I wonder why they chose this, or how they ‘sold’ McDonalds on it...
We are now witnessing our government actively sponsoring and pushing more money into areas where the entire point is to get rid of the inefficient human laborer. Tens of billions from citizens to destroy those ‘jobs’. Good luck out there.
They could have made something really beautiful. I wonder why they chose this, or how they ‘sold’ McDonalds on it...
Another article along those lines.
Washington Post’s AI-generated podcasts rife with errors, fictional quotes
They had to have told McDonald’s what their concept was; and someone at McDonald’s had to approve it.
Who's that?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.