McDonald’s Netherlands has been the protagonist of one of the controversies of the year by launching a Christmas advertisement created entirely with artificial intelligence, which It turned out to be a disaster due to the poor quality of the video.
The fast food chain has ended up removing the material from the internet and social networks in the face of a wave of very negative criticism, which shows that the video generation technology is not yet mature for certain quality standards.
If we analyze the video in detail, which is available at adforumyou will see a series of continuity errors, as well as strange textures that users have immediately rejected, breaking any attempt at emotional connection.
A poorly executed marketing campaign due to AI
The main argument of many marketing agencies for using AI in advertising is usually saving time and money. However, in this case reality contradicts theory, since everything went wrong.
The agency TBWA\Neboko and the production company The Sweetshop have confirmed that a team of ten people spent seven weeks working on this ad. It is difficult to understand how almost two months of intensive work led to a visually defective result.
An advertisement that took the same time or more than a traditional shoot, but without the image quality or warmth that real actors and conventional art direction provide.
This immediately dismantles the idea that artificial intelligence is, today, a reliable shortcut for high-level productions. And it confirms that this technology is still in its infancy in terms of professional video generation.
The strategy of using subsidiaries as a laboratory
McDonald’s Global headquarters has quickly disassociated itself from the announcement, clarifying that it is an initiative exclusive to the Dutch market. This is common practice in large multinationals, where they use specific markets to test risky technologies.
If the campaign goes well, the success is exported; if it goes wrong, like now, the error is contained locally. For the user, however, the distinction is irrelevant because the brand is the same. In the end, we see the usual logo associated with low-quality content, which ends up affecting the general perception of the company.
We must look to the agency’s parent company, Omnicom, to understand the real context. This group has been investing in AI licenses for some time as they fine-tune their workforces.
There is a well-founded concern in the sector about whether these tools are being used to reduce costs at the expense of final quality. The industry seems to be testing how far it can lower the aesthetic bar before the consumer complains..
It’s an attrition tactic; if you’re gradually exposed to ads with synthetic, less polished finishes, brands hope you’ll come to accept them as the new normal. The objective is not to improve creativity, but to make production cheaper, even if the result is visually poor..
This case is not isolated, since brands such as Coca-Cola or Toys «R» Us have already suffered similar criticism this year for similar experiments. The underlying problem is that the brain instinctively detects that the smiles, the movement of the hands or the physics of the objects in these videos are not real.
Christmas advertising traditionally seeks to strike a chord with people, something that current artificial intelligence, no matter how advanced it is, cannot replicate with conviction.
Although technology advances at an accelerated pace, this setback shows that human talent and traditional techniques remain irreplaceable for transmit authentic emotions, something that no chatbot can replicateat least not in the short term.