At first glance, McDonald’s Netherlands’ new Christmas commercial seems to have all the trappings of a classic holiday ad – snow-lined streets, festive music, and familiar seasonal sights. But look closer and it’s clear this isn’t a warm-and-fuzzy Christmas card. Titled “The Most Terrible Time of the Year,” the 45-second spot flips the beloved Andy Williams song on its head and dives headlong into holiday mayhem. Released in early December, the ad offers a wry, if unsettling, message: when the Yuletide season gets too crazy, you might as well escape to McDonald’s until the new year.
A scene from McDonald’s “The Most Terrible Time of the Year” ad, which portrays holiday carolers outside a McDonald’s – part of the ad’s AI-crafted collage of Christmas chaos.
In the ad’s world, Christmas is anything but peaceful. We see a series of fast-cut vignettes depicting the season as a slapstick nightmare: a Christmas tree explodes into flames in someone’s living room, Santa Claus causes a massive traffic jam, and frantic shoppers slip on icy streets, spilling armfuls of gifts. In one surreal scene, a hapless home cook ignites a kitchen fire amid a family dinner. All the while, an off-key chorus belts out “It’s the most terrible time of the year”, a twisted rewrite of the classic carol. The final shot delivers the punchline – a weary man finds refuge in the warm glow of a McDonald’s restaurant as the jingle urges viewers to “hide out in McDonald’s till January’s here”. It’s a daring premise that pokes fun at holiday stress, positioning the Golden Arches as a sanctuary from seasonal insanity.
Bold humor is nothing new in advertising, but the way this commercial was made is entirely unorthodox. McDonald’s “Most Terrible Time” is almost completely generated by artificial intelligence. The visuals – from the glitchy, hyperactive city scenes to the oddly distorted Christmas characters – were crafted using generative AI rather than live actors or real film shoots. The ad agency TBWA\Neboko and production house The Sweetshop opted to rely on cutting-edge AI image and video models to create the spot’s chaotic winter wonderland. According to the filmmakers, about ten AI specialists spent seven weeks coaxing the fickle tech to produce usable footage, generating “thousands of takes” and stitching together the best bits in editing. In short, this seemingly zany cartoon of an ad actually took a lot of painstaking human effort behind the scenes – just not the traditional kind. The Sweetshop’s CEO, Melanie Bridge, defended the experiment, claiming that the hours poured into refining the AI output “far exceeded a traditional shoot” and insisting “this wasn’t an AI trick. It was a film we made”.
Despite the team’s pride in pushing the envelope, the public’s reaction was swift and harsh. McDonald’s dropped the ad on its Dutch YouTube and social channels around December 6 – and by the very next day or two, comment sections were filling up with scathing remarks. Viewers largely didn’t find the joke funny at all. On YouTube, one puzzled commenter summed up the sentiment: “Ditch your family and hide in McDonald’s because Christmas sucks???“. Others blasted the ad’s uncanny, semi-animated look, calling it “creepy, depressing, and deeply unfunny”. The visuals, assembled by AI, featured telltale oddities – from grotesque, soulless human figures to physics-defying pratfalls – that some critics derided as “AI slop”, a now-popular pejorative for low-quality AI-generated content. On social media, bemused viewers joked that the future of advertising had arrived and “it’s not looking good.” Even veteran film critic Richard Roeper quipped that if McDonald’s aimed for “clumsily shot and inauthentic – nailed it!”. As negative feedback piled up by the thousands, McDonald’s Netherlands first disabled the YouTube comments, then, barely four days into the campaign, pulled the video entirely. “This commercial single-handedly ruined my Christmas spirit,” one user wrote – a hyperbolic reaction, perhaps, but indicative of the ad’s chilly reception.
What exactly provoked such backlash? Part of it was the ad’s tone. The holidays are an emotionally charged time, and while many can relate to moments of stress amid the cheer, McDonald’s went all-in on cynicism. The spot presented a bleak take on Christmas – with no happy ending or heartfelt message to cushion the snark – essentially suggesting people give up on family gatherings and seek solace in fast food. To some, that concept crossed the line from playful to mean-spirited. “The ad emphasizes all that is negative about the holiday season,” observed David Stewart, a marketing professor, adding that it’s not exactly credible to tell people McDonald’s is the answer to their yuletide woes. Moreover, the medium itself became a lightning rod. In the wake of Hollywood strikes and growing fears about automation, a major brand opting for an AI-generated commercial hit a nerve. Commentators lamented the lack of “warmth” or “humanity” in the ad’s computer-crafted characters. Some in the creative community argued that McDonald’s had effectively sidestepped hiring live actors, directors or crew, choosing algorithmic spectacle over real storytelling – a move they found troubling. On LinkedIn, industry professionals pushed back on The Sweetshop’s celebratory post, pointing out that if only ten people made this ad, that’s far fewer jobs than a traditional shoot would have provided The ad thus became a flashpoint in the debate over AI’s role in media, with one commentator tweeting that “AI slop is worse than the Black Death… a digital plague” when it comes to replacing human creators. McDonald’s, it seemed, had stumbled into a perfect storm of holiday sentimentality meets tech skepticism.
Faced with the uproar, McDonald’s moved quickly to contain the damage. By December 9, just a long weekend after launch, the company scrubbed “The Most Terrible Time of the Year” from its official channels. In a public statement that struck a conciliatory tone, McDonald’s Netherlands acknowledged the ad missed the mark. “It was intended to reflect the stressful moments that can occur during the holidays in the Netherlands,” the statement read, but the company admitted they “recognize that for many of our guests, the season is the most wonderful time of the year”. In a few polite sentences, McDonald’s essentially conceded that its attempt at commiserating with holiday stress had come off as too grim. The fast-food giant affirmed its commitment to offering “good times and good food for everyone,” subtly reassuring customers that it knows Christmas is about joy after all. The ad’s creators also stepped forward to defend their work – albeit a bit defensively. The Sweetshop’s CEO deleted her initial LinkedIn post but argued in follow-up comments that the team had poured “blood, sweat, and tears” into the project, using AI as just another tool in the filmmaking arsenal. “The vision, the taste, the leadership… that will always be human,” she wrote, framing the experiment as an expansion of creative possibilities, not a replacement of artists. That stance, however, didn’t silence the debate. In fact, an intriguing footnote to the whole saga emerged: the two human directors originally attached to the commercial, an LA-based duo, revealed that they resigned mid-production because the AI-driven process had largely cut them out. Lacking creative control or even the ability to see what the AI was generating until the end, they walked away on ethical grounds. Their departure underscores just how uncharted the territory was on this project – even seasoned directors weren’t sure how to fit into an AI-dominated workflow.
For McDonald’s, this episode stands in stark contrast to its other recent holiday campaigns, highlighting a cultural divide in approach. In the UK, for example, McDonald’s 2025 Christmas advert took a far more familiar route: it teamed up with Dr. Seuss’s infamous Grinch, the ultimate holiday grump, in a lighthearted story about the character’s failed attempts to sabotage Christmas meals. That UK ad, titled “McDonald’s Christmas Grinched,” is full of mischief and magic – a cartoonish Grinch plotting to ruin families’ McDonald’s feasts, only to unwittingly add to the festive fun. It’s a cheeky, family-friendly tie-in (complete with a themed menu and even Grinchy green French fries on offer) that ultimately reinforces the warm, communal vibe of the season. Likewise, in the past, McDonald’s global holiday ads have tended to be heartwarming or whimsical, from sentimental tales of reindeer carrots to nostalgic scenes of families bonding over Happy Meals. Against that backdrop, the Dutch “Most Terrible Time” experiment was a risky outlier. It eschewed sentiment for satire, and replaced real-life charm with an uncanny digital spectacle. It’s telling that while the Grinch campaign aimed to make viewers smile (and maybe buy a novelty milkshake), the AI-driven ad seems to have left many viewers unsettled or even upset. When comparing the two, one can’t help but conclude that McDonald’s tried to play Grinch for real in the Netherlands – and learned it’s a fine line between clever and coal-worthy.
McDonald’s wasn’t the only big brand dabbling in AI this holiday season, however, and the mixed reaction it got is part of a broader trend. Coca-Cola, an iconic player in holiday advertising, also rolled out an AI-generated Christmas ad in 2025 – despite getting plenty of backlash for a similar stunt the year before. Determined to prove the technology’s potential, Coke’s new “Holidays Are Coming” campaign took a different tack: it mostly avoided the creepy human figures that plagued its 2024 AI ad, and instead filled the screen with whimsical CGI animals in a winter wonderland. In Coca-Cola’s digitally crafted world, a magical Coke delivery truck winds through snowy forests, awakening polar bears, deer, and even random sloths, all frolicking amid twinkling lights. The result is still unmistakably AI-made – reviewers noted the odd, weightless movement and the patchwork, hyper-real visuals – but Coca-Cola managed to sidestep the worst of the “uncanny valley” by keeping human faces mostly out of frame. That doesn’t mean Coke escaped criticism; many viewers and artists remain skeptical of this new high-tech approach to beloved holiday themes. Yet Coke’s persistence (this was year two of its AI experiment) and McDonald’s cautionary tale share a common lesson: the era of AI in advertising has arrived, but audiences are not automatically on board. Both companies found that nostalgia and tradition are powerful forces – and tinkering too much with them, whether via tone or tech, can lead to backlash.
In the end, “The Most Terrible Time of the Year” may go down as one of 2025’s most infamous commercials – not for what it was selling, but for how it was made and how strongly people reacted. It’s rare for a brand as savvy as McDonald’s to pull an ad days after launch, especially a high-profile Christmas spot, which shows just how far off-key this experiment landed. To be fair, the idea wasn’t without merit: there’s a kernel of truth in laughing at holiday stress, and plenty of people do feel overwhelmed this time of year. A dark comedy spin on Christmas could have been refreshingly honest. But the execution mattered. The jarring aesthetics of AI, combined with a message bordering on “forget your family, just eat a burger,” ended up alienating the very audience it meant to amuse. On the flip side, the controversy has made the ad far more talked-about than any safe, cookie-cutter campaign McDonald’s might have run. In that sense, it’s a reminder that bold advertising bets carry both risk and reward – sometimes you strike a chord, and other times you hit a nerve. As brands like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola probe the limits of AI-generated content, they’re learning in real time that innovation has to be balanced with humanity and insight. This Christmas, at least, telling stressed-out consumers that a Big Mac is the answer to their problems earned McDonald’s a big “Bah, humbug.” The hope (for both advertisers and audiences) is that next time technology and tradition can mingle more merrily. After all, even when it’s terrible, this time of year is supposed to be wonderful – and no one really wants to escape that.
