The AI Trust Gap
Case Study: McDonald’s Netherlands and the Christmas Ad That Lasted Three Days
Author: IMB Editorial Team
IMB Journal – International Marketing Board
Volume 1 | Issue 6
June 2026
Case Study: McDonald’s Netherlands and the Christmas Ad That Lasted Three Days
Unlike most case studies in this journal, this one isn’t anonymized. Every detail below is a matter of public record, reported across trade press and mainstream outlets in December 2025.
The Setup
On December 6, McDonald’s Netherlands published a 45-second holiday commercial to its YouTube channel titled “It’s the Most Terrible Time of the Year,” a play on the Andy Williams standard. The ad was built entirely with generative AI, produced by Dutch agency TBWA\Neboko in partnership with the U.S. production company The Sweetshop Films, using an in-house AI engine the studio calls The Gardening Club. Rather than a straightforward feel-good holiday spot, the concept leaned into comedic chaos: a family’s presents flying off a car roof under a low bridge, carolers losing their sheet music in a blizzard, a string of small holiday disasters resolving with a visit to McDonald’s.
The agency’s own framing of the project, reported before the backlash began, was that the creative team had deliberately challenged the production studio to build the entire film using AI rather than traditional shooting. It was, in other words, conceived from the start as a showcase of what the technology could now do unassisted.
What Went Wrong
The reaction was immediate and largely negative. Viewers online described the ad as unsettling rather than funny: characters moved with a subtle wrongness, facial expressions didn’t quite track with the action, and background details had the slightly-off quality that has become a recognizable signature of AI-generated video. Commentary across social platforms converged on a single dismissive label that had already become shorthand for the broader trend that year: AI slop.
The criticism wasn’t limited to the visuals. A number of viewers pointed out that the ad’s premise, framing the holidays as stressful and chaotic rather than warm, sat awkwardly with a brand whose holiday advertising has traditionally leaned on sentimentality. Combining an unfamiliar, faintly eerie visual style with an intentionally cynical tone gave critics two separate reasons to dislike the spot rather than one, and the two criticisms reinforced each other.
The Response
McDonald’s Netherlands disabled comments on the video within days of publication and removed it from its YouTube channel entirely, roughly three days after it first went live. In a statement provided to multiple outlets, the company said it had decided to remove the AI-generated advert, explaining that the intent had been to capture the stressful moments the holidays can bring, while acknowledging that for many customers the season is meant to feel like the most wonderful time of the year rather than the most terrible one. A separate comment attributed to the company described the episode as an important learning about the effective use of AI in advertising.
Notably, the company’s public response addressed both the tone of the concept and the fact of its AI production, without treating either as the sole cause. That framing matters, because it left room for McDonald’s to continue using AI in other, less visible parts of its marketing operation without appearing to reverse course entirely.
What Changed
McDonald’s has not published another fully AI-generated commercial in a customer-facing holiday campaign since. The broader effect was felt across the industry rather than inside one company: the incident became a frequently cited reference point in marketing trade press throughout the first half of 2026, cited alongside Coca-Cola’s own AI-generated holiday campaigns as evidence that full automation of customer-facing creative carried a real reputational cost, even for globally recognized brands with substantial production budgets.
The Lesson
The McDonald’s case is notable because the failure wasn’t technical. The AI tools performed exactly as advertised, and the campaign was produced faster and more cheaply than a traditional shoot would have allowed. The failure was in treating audience acceptance of AI-generated creative as a given rather than something to test carefully, in a category, holiday advertising, where warmth and craft are precisely the qualities the format has always depended on. A three-day lifespan for a campaign that likely took weeks to produce is a difficult number to defend on any return-on-investment basis, however efficient the production process behind it.
Part of a three-part series on AI and advertising trust. Next: a short insight on the one distinction that separates AI use that builds trust from AI use that erodes it.