I’m (NOT) Loving It: How they almost stole Christmas

Written by Asa-Mari Z. ––

Key Points

McDonald’s Netherlands released a Christmas ad created with generative AI that reframed the season as “the most terrible time of the year,” depicting escalating holiday mishaps relieved only by McDonald’s.
The ad faced widespread backlash with reports noting that comments were disabled and versions were later made private or pulled.
Public criticism centered less on the use of AI itself and more on the decision to pair AI with a cynical, misery-forward holiday narrative aimed at an already fatigued audience.

At the same time, McDonald’s successfully launched a Grinch Meal tied to Dr. Seuss Enterprises, demonstrating the brand’s ability to deliver subversive yet warm holiday storytelling.
Worker anxiety around AI adoption is well documented, alongside rising energy demand and infrastructure strain linked to data centers powering AI systems.
This campaign functions as a small but telling example of a broader economic and cultural imbalance shaping how AI is deployed and received.

Listen to the podcast version of this story.

Watching the McDonald’s Netherlands AI Christmas ad brought on the kind of unease you get when a meeting runs too long and no one seems willing to ask the obvious question: What are we doing?

In that moment, I wasn’t hearing “I’m lovin’ it.” I was hearing the opposite. No, really. I hate this. Please make it stop.

The ad opens by transforming a familiar holiday song into “the most terrible time of the year.” What follows is a relentless montage of December disasters. Gifts ruined. Accidents piling up. People pinballing through the season as if joy were an urban legend. Relief arrives not through connection or kindness, but through McDonald’s.

I understand the instinct to push back against sugar-coated holiday fantasies. December can be expensive, loud, and exhausting. Many people carry grief or anxiety straight through the twinkle lights.

What caught me off guard wasn’t the brutal honesty. It was the tone. The ad didn’t feel like recognition so much as dismissal. It landed like a shrug, as if a globally recognizable brand looked at a tired public and decided resignation was the most resonant message it could offer. Delivering that message through generative AI only sharpened the effect.

That combination is what turned this from a strange creative choice into something worth examining more closely, and what made the storyteller in me sit up and say, "No. We need to talk about this."

Challenge: Novelty or nightmare fuel?

Here’s what’s verifiable:

McDonald’s Netherlands released a Christmas campaign reframing December as a stressful, chaotic period, positioning McDonald’s as a brief refuge.

The campaign was produced using 100% generative AI. TBWA\Neboko and production company The Sweetshop emphasized that human labor was involved in prompt-writing, iteration, and refinement. Public statements described weeks of intensive work and framed the result as directed craft rather than automation, arguing that craft and direction still mattered, and that AI was chosen partly for budget and speed. The intent was to challenge the polished perfection of traditional holiday advertising and reflect the stress many people feel during December, supported by research which suggests that consumers wanted more realistic portrayals of the season.

And, yes, that premise has merit.Holiday burnout is real. There’s pressure to spend, perform, travel, host, and remain cheerful on command. For a lot of people, December feels less like a celebration and more like a test of endurance.

The problem, however, lies in how that insight was translated.

McDonald’s core audience consists largely of working people: parents juggling schedules, students watching budgets, workers fitting meals into short breaks; for many, McDonald’s is a practical stop based on logistics and affordability rather than indulgence.

Holiday ads, in that context, serve as atmosphere. They soften the month, offering a brief pause from the grind, reminding people that warmth is still allowed.

Culture Crave covers the situation from their Bluesky account

This ad moved in the opposite direction.

Throughout, chaos accumulated without relief, humor felt distant rather than shared, and the message drifted from acknowledgment toward dismissal. The visual language amplified that shift even further. Generative AI video still carries recognizable artifacts: odd motion, distorted faces, physics that never quite settles. In another context, perhaps, that might read as experimental, but here, it compounded unease. The result felt like nightmare fuel asking a tired audience to laugh at a version of the season that felt frightening instead of familiar.

The Solution: Understanding the power of storytelling

Reaction was swift and widely documented. Critics described the visuals as uncanny and unpleasant. Online commentary mocked the tone. Multiple outlets reported that comments were disabled and that versions of the ad were later unlisted or removed.

Surprisingly, at the same time, McDonald’s was running a Grinch Meal promotion tied to Dr. Seuss Enterprises. That campaign leans into nostalgia and mischievous warmth, and reportedly performed strongly.

The coexistence of these two campaigns is significant.

In one part of the brand, McDonald’s demonstrates a clear understanding of the emotional assignment: tap into a beloved character who hates Christmas for reasons people understand, then move him toward warmth, mischief, and redemption.

In another, the brand commissioned a grim AI fever dream where Christmas is a hazard course and your survival earns an order number.

Same company.

Same season.

Two radically different interpretations of “holiday storytelling.”

That contrast raises the question that actually matters.

When a tool constrains the story, responsible creative work adapts

The backlash didn’t occur in a vacuum, and can’t be explained by aesthetics alone. Context matters.

And in 2025, AI doesn’t arrive as a neutral novelty. It arrives wrapped in economic and cultural tension.

Pew Research has documented substantial concern among U.S. workers about AI’s impact on jobs, with many expecting fewer opportunities as adoption accelerates, with broader polling reflecting similar unease and fear of large-scale displacement.

At the same time, AI’s physical footprint continues to expand. The International Energy Agency estimates that data centers consumed roughly 415 TWh of electricity in 2024 and projected demand to more than double by 2030, driven largely by AI workloads.

MIT reporting has outlined the associated environmental consequences, including rising electricity demand and water use for cooling systems.

These pressures shape how people interpret corporate choices. When a brand adopts AI, audiences don’t see a neutral tool. They see a symbol tied to job insecurity, rising costs, and systems that feel increasingly indifferent to everyday strain.

Now, it would be reasonable to believe there were other creative paths available to the team responsible for this output. Even if licensing or training constraints limited the use of Grinch imagery within an AI workflow, I can think of two very distinct alternative options.

In option 1, generative AI tools could have been used in concepting for style experimentation, to create animatics, support pre-visualization, and generate background elements, with the final execution being achieved through traditional methods.

But even if a fully AI-generated final asset was a non-negotiable client requirement, the story itself could have been shaped differently.

Imagine option 2: an original, Grinch-adjacent character.

Maybe an anti-Santa, an Ebenezer-Scrooge-in-hoodie type. Someone who genuinely doesn’t like Christmas but because frankly, life has been hard. Long shifts. Bills. Family stress. Let’s name him...Joe.

Around him, the world is lit up: decorations, families laughing, endless social media posts of perfect trees and matching pajamas, and Joe feels out of place everywhere he goes.

In this version, McDonald's isn't a temple of corporate salvation; it’s simply open and warm, and the golden arches are friendly and familiar. While there, Joe runs into versions of his own “ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future”: other customers, workers on break, a kid trading jokes with the staff, someone quietly FaceTiming their family in another country. Small, human scenes. And the arc is simple: It does not fix Joe’s life, erase his stress, or promise perfection. But for twenty minutes, Joe gets to sit inside a pocket of ordinary, imperfect warmth.

At the end, in drops the actual Grinch Meal motif. Tie-in achieved. Joe is your emotional surrogate, and now, the message becomes:

“You don’t have to love everything about this season, but it doesn’t have to feel terrible. Here’s a place in your neighborhood where you can breathe”.

A character finding a small, ordinary moment of relief instead of spectacle.

A pause that feels recognizably human. Human directors sculpting something humane.

That story could have been told with AI animation, if they were determined to showcase the technology; my point here being that creating an ad that meets the moment didn’t necessitate abandoning warmth.

What’s even more unsettling here is the sense of mandate, and the feeling that producing a fully AI-generated ad became more important than asking what story would actually serve the audience.

This is how imbalance sets in.

When incentives reward novelty, speed, and cost control care becomes optional, and the public absorbs the downstream effects.

Higher costs.

Less stability.

A growing sense that decisions are being made somewhere far away, by people who won’t bear the consequences.

When people say, “This McDonald’s ad feels creepy, soulless, and exploitative,” on the face it may seem they’re being resistant to change, but beneath the surface they’re responding to a very real mismatch between how executives talk about AI (efficiency, innovation, disruption), and how it actually feels to watch these outputs when you know your job, your bills, and your environment are on the line. In that scenario, a cynical holiday ad reads less like cool or edgy and more like confirmation of the culture’s worst fears.

The takeaway: Technology should serve people, not the other way around

So what did we learn?

AI is not the villain. Misused power is.

In the end the heart of the issue wasn’t just that AI was used, but that it was used to create a grim, uncanny story that punches down at an audience already exhausted by real-world stress.

Creative choices are political choices.

In a world where AI is linked to data center boomtowns, water stress, rising energy demand, and job cuts in creative and white-collar sectors, choosing AI for a high-profile campaign is a political act. The least you can do is make art that earns that cost.

And McDonald’s had already proved it knew better. The success of The Grinch Meal demonstrates successfully how to tap into reluctant, conflicted holiday feelings without flattening the season with cynicism. Constraints don’t excuse abandoning empathy; they demand better creative decisions.

Trust erodes quickly when brands treat exhaustion as entertainment.

Let’s be clear:

People see the layoffs. They see the headlines about data center moratoriums and rising electricity costs. They read about emissions going up again because of AI demand. They feel uneasy when every industry suddenly says “AI or bust.”

Then they’re shown an ad that looks like a hallucination and told it’s “relatable”.

This was a polished example of a broader imbalance in the global economy; one where institutions move fast, absorb gains, and expect the public to manage the consequences quietly.

Stories shape how we understand the world, and the tools we use to tell them shape what kind of future feels possible. If we want a future that still leaves room for warmth, curiosity, and wonder, then we have to insist on better choices from the people with the power to do better.

Not louder. Not stranger. Simply more human.

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