McDonald’s Netherlands embraces the “terrible” side of Christmas in new AI spot via TBWA\Neboko
In the lead-up to Christmas, Campaign Brief is shining a spotlight on the season’s most anticipated campaigns from around the globe. As these campaigns roll out, we’ll be rounding up the highlights to keep you in the loop.
TBWA\NEBOKO has put a bold creative twist on the holiday season for McDonald’s Netherlands, steering away from the usual glossy cheer and instead celebrating the beautifully chaotic reality of December. The centrepiece is a playful rework of the iconic Christmas classic, transforming It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year into a wryly honest “most terrible time of the year.”
The agency used this reinterpretation as a springboard for a series of exaggerated, hyper-relatable December moments, each pushed to absurdity through a fully AI-driven production approach. Working with Sweetshop’s AI innovation division, The Gardening.club, TBWA\NEBOKO crafted its first end-to-end AI commercial, blending real production sensibility with the surreal energy AI makes possible.
The film leans into everyday pre-Christmas tension including jammed schedules, unrealistic expectations and domestic chaos. Rather than disguise it, the creative embraces the mess, using humour and visual exaggeration to spotlight the collective sigh many people feel this time of year.
McDonald’s Netherlands
Marketing Manager: Karin van Prooijen
Creative Agency: TBWA\Neboko
CCO: Darre van Dijk
Production Company: Sweetshop UK
Executive Producer/Producer: Morgan Whitlock
AI Production team: TheGardening.Club
Visual Effects Lead / Lead AI Artist: Jon Baxter
Producer: Angela Jackson-Betts
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3 Comments
Why generative AI? You can’t put in the work?
They did put in the work. AI is tool like any other, 3D animation software or film camera, it has it’s nuances what it can do and what it can’t do and in storytelling you need to know these limits to tell a story this good.
In order to create a film like this means:
1. you need to be good at storytelling (sense of taste, sense of pacing…)
2. you need to come up with an idea
3. in order for agency or client take you seriously you need to have done alot of films, have a good track record
4. you have to battle the randomness of AI. AI does not understand narrative, it only predicts(takes it’s best guess), It’s not just typing a sentence and getting a movie. It’s generating hundreds of clips just to get a usable 3-second shot where the physics doesn’t completely break or the background doesn’t melt. You are cherry-picking the top 1% of output.
5. Technical consistency is a nightmare. Keeping a visual style or character face looking like the same person through out the film and across different angles and lighting isn’t automatic. Yes it has got better, but most likely these guys have gone through hell before.
6. Post-production is actually harder. The raw video usually has artifacts, glitches, or weird textures. You still have to jump into After Effects or Nuke to rotoscope, composite, color grade, and fix the AI jank manually.
7. Sound design and editing are still 100% manual. Today sound created with AI tools is far from production quality. You still have to pace the edit, build the soundscape, do the foley, and mix the audio to make it feel real.
8. And if client (CMO or legal team) has any comments, which they mostly do, then entire new universe of pain breaks loose.
I understand that people think that there is a magic AI button which just generates everything by itself… people though the same about 3D animation, you hit render and pixar quality.
I don’t think the tech we call AI should be called AI, it’s more like a prediction machine… tbh for most of the time it feels like trying play pool with 10m stick. There are tons of aspects in film or 3D animation production that people who work with AI models that they would dream about.
For example, if you want omeone to cut an apple into slices and then sprinkle some cinnamon on it and then take a bite. You can’t believe how difficult it would be to get that right. First if you are novice then you might want to just write a prompt and expect that everything will work out fine… but no. Most likely after seeing the results you keep adding and adding words to the prompt and still not get it right. You might get problems like cinnamon just appears in characters hand and disappears randomly or it switches to another slice of apple. So if you are experienced creator, then you have gone through that hell and you think differently, you break the action down to individual shots, simple right? Well, not quite, now you keep the consistency in all those shots, remember the randomness aspect. So you need to figure out how to keep simple thing like apple slice and hand consistent through out the shots.
Most likely one needs to spend months and months even years to master all these aspects, because this was just super easy problem.
This is just different workflow, not a lack of work. People comments on storytelling made by using AI models, are same as commenting an character in the movie, that it’s not a real person, it’s an actor or say that acting is easy, why they don’t they want to get a real job. It is as real as any other.
Judge the story and storytelling, not the tools. I’ve seen and heard stories told good and bad by using all kinds of ways, in person, filming, animation, genai…
Looking forward to learning