I was sitting in a movie theater with my mom, freshly buttered popcorn in hand, ready to see Dave Franco star in Now You See Me 3, when our previews were rudely interrupted with Coca-Cola's newest holiday ad. While my mom was enjoying the cute polar bears, I was scowling. When she asked me what was wrong, I told her that this was the AI commercial I hadn't been able to escape lately.
McDonald's and Coca-Cola seem determined to ruin our holiday cheer this year with AI. Each company has released a holiday-themed commercial, and each is terrible in its own way. And if the online backlash is anything to go by, I'm not the only one mad about the usage of AI.
McDonald's is the newest offender, with its commercial featuring a series of holiday-themed mishaps, set to a parody of the song It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year, about how it's actually the most terrible time of the year. The commercial is only 30 seconds long and intended only for the Netherlands, but it has already garnered so much hate online that the company has removed the video from its pages. The marketing agency behind the spot, The Sweetshop Film, still has the video up on its website.
The McDonald's ad is very clearly AI, with short clips stitched together with a bunch of hard jump cuts. The text isn't nearly legible, fine details are off, and it just has that AI look I've come to quickly recognize as an AI reporter. By contrast, the Coca-Cola commercial is a little more put-together. A Coca-Cola truck drives through a wintry landscape and into a snowy town, and forest animals awaken to follow the truck and its soda bottle contents to a lit Christmas tree in a town square. But even this video has clearly AI-generated elements.
While disappointed, I wasn't surprised when I saw the ad and the resulting backlash. There has been a surge in creative generative AI tools, especially in the past year, with numerous AI tools built specifically for marketers. They promise to help create content, automate workflows and analyze data. A huge proportion (94%) of marketers have a dedicated AI budget, and three-quarters of them expect that budget to grow, according to Canva's 2025 Marketing and AI report.
What is completely and utterly exhausting is huge corporations like McDonald's and Coca-Cola choosing to rely so heavily on AI. McDonald's made $25.9 billion in revenue in 2024, and Coca-Cola made $47.1 billion. Do these companies expect us to be OK with AI slop garbage when they could've spent a tiny fraction of that to hire a real animator or videographer?
These feel-good, festive commercials manage to hit upon every single controversial issue in AI, which is why they're inspiring such strong reactions from viewers. AI content is becoming -- has already become -- normalized. We can't escape chatbots online and AI slop in our feeds. McDonald's and Coca-Cola's use of AI is yet another sign that companies are plowing ahead with AI without truly considering how we'll react. Like advertisements, AI is inescapable.
If AI in advertising is here to stay, it's worth breaking down how it's used and where we, as media consumers, don't want to see it used. And while this is very much not a defense of Coca-Cola or AI, there is at least one thing the company did right with this specific ad.
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Spotting the AI in Coca-Cola's ad
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