McDonald's pulls AI-generated Christmas advert following backlash

What a wholrsome message, I wonder why it flopped?

"Screw Christmas, Screw your family, come to McDonalds. We also made this with AI you stupid bitch"

I'm sure McDs and Coke could push out terrible AI ads for the next decade and it wouldn't dampen their sales long term. An initial slump until everyone got over it, maybe. They're global brands that have gotten too damn big to fail.

One is left wondering why they even advertise.
- For coke I imagine it’s the desire to remain continuously culturally relevant so it remains - the - fizzy sugar water in everyone’s minds. (How effective that actually is I have no idea and I suspect, neither do they).
  McDs meanwhile has lost revenue (in part attributed to their price hikes amongst other factors ) and is probably hoping to drive up sales.

Now I'm wondering if their meat is real. Time for me to switch to "Amburgers and Woot Beer" (A&W).

I’m surprised they aren’t selling Walmarts radioactive shrimp

All according to the plan.

Release an AI ad, knowing full well it will cause a lot of headlines and people talking/hating it, based on what happened with the coke ad.

Then remove the ad due to "backlash" and say something like "We listened to you, our dear customers, so sowwy for the AI slop, we the good guys"

BAM! Now you have half the world talking about the ad and making everyone think about McDonald's.

I personally would have probably never even seen that ad if not for all the headlines and posts.

Well, if it ain't the ol' Reverse Barbara Streisand Effect Method...
Bad press for AI is good even if McDonald's gets some sort boost from the controversy (I don't think they will).
- They did get a boost. No one's gonna boycott McDonald's for this, but the publicity and brand awareness they got from it is HUGE.
  And this might actually boost AI too. Some people DID like the ad, so AI ad companies might just double down on making AI ads better, invest more money into r&d etc. Because if huge companies like McDonald's and coke are buying AI ads, there's definitely a market there.
A hallmark of this era. Why please those you serve when you can instead infuriate them with a fraction of the effort and still turn a profit?
This does not make me want mcd's.
- yeah this doesn't effect me at all. there are enough other reasons not to buy it
  it's shit now
  it's expensive now
  service sucks now
  it's american
Sadly you're right. Bad publicity is still publicity
I still haven't, nor the coke one.
- You’re in a thread about McDonalds, so they get the benefit of you seeing the ad without paying for the extra impression.
Maccas getting their grubby fingers in the rage economy 😒
- Rage economy :(

Even if wasn't AI it was still a shitty ad for expensive, mediocre food.

That's what I find crazy. People used to eat there all the time because it was so cheap. These days you'll be lucky to find anything under $5 and most combos cost upwards of $15+. All my coworkers used to stop there for lunch between job sites but now they all just bring shit from home. If you are still eating there at this point my guess is you just like mediocre food. If beef prices weren't so messed up right now I'd say it'd be cheaper just to make it at home.
- they shrinkflationed thier food, and they never went back.
- If you want cheap food, Costco food court is where it's at. 15 bucks (if that) for a large meal, a drink, and some kind of dessert.
- iirc from their last financials hearings, revenue from lower class orders have dropped significantly, however thr median buyer group has started to spend more to offset those losses. mcdonalds I think had 2% growth suprisingly while the rest of the industry floundered.
  basically it's people who wont pick a better place to get food proping mcdonalds
- If beef prices weren't so messed up right now I'd say it'd be cheaper just to make it at home.
  It IS cheaper to make at home, and always has been. Even during the time McDonald's was still affordable it was still more expensive than cooking it yourself
- If you use the app, you can get a large Ice Tea and a Large Fries for $2.20 including tax. That’s all I ever get there, once a month or so. They gotta be losing money on that deal. I’m slowly putting them out of business. You’re welcome.
- Prices are high everywhere, so while it's way more expensive than it was, McDonald's is still pretty much the cheapest option.
  A large value meal costs ~$9, and there is a 20% discount for using the app at $15, so if 2 people go or you bring some home it's ~$7. Every $60 you spend nets you free happy meal too.
  Meanwhile a local place charges $20 for a burger and fries, no drink, before tip. The grocery store is up to $8.99 a pound for hamburger meat, so while it is still cheaper to make it yourself, by the time you include cooking ingredients it's pretty comparable.
- I read that the upper/middle class has started going to fast food more because they can’t afford the lunches/dinners they used to get.
Yeah I heard a guy use McDonald's in an illustration the other day, how people see the golden arches and everyone recognizes it, knows what to expect. The same food all over the country, similar food around the world. And it's fast and cheap.
And I'm like.... Right... Maybe once upon a time..

Just seems like another lousy ad, AI or not.

I have no idea what ads look like anymore, so I have nothing to compare it to. So they should have been asking, who is going to see this? Maybe they did do that and figured the demographic wouldn't care.

I think the last time i saw a tv ad was 10+ years ago. Except for the one time i pirated some trash tv show and they forgot to cut out the ads. Because it was american it was extra dystopian. I don't know how people do it. Do you get used to that or am i just turbo autistic
- It's a little of column a & column b. Until recently I was paying for entertainment services, then they started including ads in premium memberships (except dropout, you're a real one Sam!). I went, as you so eloquently stated, turbo autistic. And cancelled everything (again except dropout) and locked my virtual presence down. I'm talking vpns,a pi hole, modded apks, the fucking works aside from a complete degoogling which is next in the list. That was a year or two ago, and I honestly must've had something like digital Stockholm syndrome cause it really doesn't feel all that different cause I would typically zone out during commercial breaks anyways. But I had my mom in town visiting and she wanted to watch wicked and it was pretty jarring having to sit through 2-3 minutes of ads to watch the movie.

For fuck's sake people...

Here's the ad: https://www.adforum.com/creative-work/ad/player/34728882/its-the-most-terrible-time-of-the-year/mcdonalds

Holy shit that whole thing was off-putting even without considering where it came from.
The ad was a weird take. I think it's a mixture of the message and the uncanny Ai. Even if the ad wasn't Ai, it'd be a really odd ad.
Yeah, pretty much all of that hit my uncanny valley instincts. It was definitely, significantly edited after generation, but the clips themselves were...not right.
There's definitely some AI in it, and it's definitely shit.
- Some AI? It's all AI!
Pass
Seems I suck at spotting ai in this clip. The cat one looked off and maybe the dude hanging down from the fairy lights but honestly I would have assumed it was all filmed or animated for the cookies.
This is a wild place. Share you experience and get more downvotes than upvotes. Not that votes matter it’s just an odd thing to do. Sorry I can’t see things like y’all.
- AI makes all animals more fluffy and cutesy than they are in real life. My mom keeps trying to show me "real" videos that are funny or cute and it just makes me want to put her in a home. She's also a shit human outside of that, so don't judge me for wanting to put her in a home for not recognizing AI.
- The tree exploded weird, the mixer was vibrating weird, the guy falling on the ice flopped weird, I could go on. It was weird after weird clips stacked on each other

The ad was just as synthetic as their food. Glad they pulled it though, it was really off to watch…

That is an unusually adept use of symbolism for a brand

"This wasn't an AI trick," she said. "It was a film."

Nah. It really was an AI trick.

Not a trick, actually. The trick was poisoning the water of some community, and making their utilities go up for this bullshit.

Use generative ai on your brand once and you will never get rid of the stink.

Short memories
- For some anyway.

Seven weeks just for slop that didn't convert a single customer.

Gross, out of all the options to "hide out" in MD would be my last choice. It's loud, smelly, sticky, and their bathrooms are dirty. That's a bad ad. Way to really miss your target audience mark.

I live in Japan and I actually kinda miss going there because it's pretty good here. Fast, cheap, friendly service, pretty clean and has cool happy meals for my kids. Unfortunately, my family has been boycotting US companies.
- I see that your AI enabled smart phone accidentally autocorrected fortunately, to unfortunately. Let the US crumble and enjoy the show.
- I used to watch a lot of travel streams and it's amazing how much nicer the American chains are in other countries lol.
Exactly. We Jews know that the place to hide out on Christmas is a Chinese restaurant.
- That's the home base where you guys control everything?
- As a Jew, can't you just hide out at home?

“Most terrible” works well for McD

It's ironic that for all the broken record whining about "attacks on Christmas", the first legitimate one I've seen is from their largest multinational corporation.
They seem to be sending the message that holiday cheer and time with the family is all overrated bullshit and you should just stay home and stuff your face with mcdonald's instead. Honestly surprised that the AI is people's biggest concern here instead of the soulless corpo propaganda.
- Oh that’s a devastating point, didn’t consider the War on Christmas angle. I’d like to give people the benefit of the doubt in that they knew something was fundamentally wrong here, and AI generated happened to be an easy superficial scapegoat. Very insightful comment on the intent behind the prompt that generated this.

I think if the last place I could go for comfort was McDonalds I would blow my fucking brains out.

Charlie's take is extremely funny, and the response letter from the marketing company over the backlash is so absurd. Worth a watch

https://youtu.be/COtZc4S4rdY

Been a while since a had a good laugh at a Charlie vid, thanks

Maybe it’s because of the tiny video on my phone, and that it was on mute, but I don’t really see what the problem is. It looks like any other advertisement. It does not make me want to go to McDonald’s any more than I already did not.

I assume this is all anti-ai pushback.

I assume this is all anti-ai pushback.
Well, yeah, but it’s also crap visually probably because it is AI. The pacing, the creepy textures and unnatural movement and physics put the whole thing in the uncanny valley.
- That is pretty standard pacing. Annoying, but standard. I don’t know what physics you were talking about. The cat and the tree? That would clearly be CG if not AI.
  Again, I looked at it on a tiny screen.
  Maybe if I was the kind of person who watched McDonald’s commercials on a large screen and then got upset when I thought some of it might be AI, and then went frame by frame pointing out how bad I thought it was. Then went to social media to complain.
Lemmy will downvote you for it because they're all luddites, but I think you're right. Even the worst parts just look like bad special effects/cgi more than anything.
It's not like we look to adverts for their creativity.
- Maybe you don't
- I like the part with the cat.

The ad was openly marketed as being created with AI. So, for all those folks who say they "just want AI content to be labelled as such", this is a major reason why there are so many people who refuse to do that. They know it doesn't help.

Slop is slop. It's just nice to have disclosure, too.
- Sure, but that disclosure is simply painting a target on themselves. If they're going to be pilloried whether they do it or not then why draw attention? Keeping it unlabelled at least allows for the chance that nobody will notice.
Slapping a disclosure doesn’t give you a get out of jail free card if you oppose AI ads in general. The argument of “well now they just won’t tell you” rings a bit hollow.
AI or not the ad in question was dogshit.