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Be afraid, be very afraid. That’s what we’d been told in the advertising and commercial production industry. AI is coming for your job. It’ll be faster than you, more creative than you and certainly more cost-effective than you.
Well, if the McDonald’s new – but swiftly deleted – Christmas ad was anything to go by, we haven’t, for the moment, got too much to worry about.
The completely AI ad was produced for the Netherlands but thanks to YouTube, has been been met with a mix of ridicule and revulsion all over the world. Ridicule because its images are so badly rendered and revulsion because those images are also quite creepy and disturbing.
The response has been so overwhelmingly hostile that McDonald’s were forced to pull the ad after just three days – and their folly has cost them a fortune.
It may look like it was quickly knocked up in the bedroom of a tragic nerd with a laptop, but apparently not. Melanie Bridge, CEO of the Sweetshop, the production company responsible for it, was at great pains to stress that a huge amount of time – and therefore money – had gone into its creation.
Instead of keeping quiet and waiting for the storm to pass, she unwisely launched an impassioned defence of the ad and made things about a hundred times worse.
“For seven weeks, we hardly slept,” she said. “The hours that went into this job far exceeded a typical commercial shoot.” She then mentioned the “blood, sweat and tears” involved in completing it. Looking at the finished result, I can well believe there were tears.
What on earth were they thinking? The Sweetshop is a great production company – I’ve shot with them more than once – so how did they end up producing such a dreadful piece of work? Seven weeks would have been plenty of time to shoot it properly with things like cameras and actual human beings. Without AI, it may not have had the exaggerated violence and horrible scenarios but that would have considerably improved the final commercial.
In advertising there’s a golden triangle of “Good, Cheap and Quick.” It’s rare to find an ad that’s all three, but most can achieve at least one. The McDonald’s ad has the unenviable distinction of being none of them.
AI was supposed to take care of the “quick” and the “cheap” side of things but, judging by what Melanie Bridge had to say, this horror show was both expensive and slow.
Still, she deserves some credit for refusing to blame poor technology, saying, “AI didn’t make this ad. We did. It was craft, just using different tools.” And I suppose she’s right: it’s just like painting a wall with a spoon.
Which leaves us with the third component of the golden triangle – the one marked “Good.”
This ad could have been beautifully shot by a visionary director or brought to life using stunning 3D animation and it would still never have been good. Its premise was to take Andy Williams’s Christmas favorite “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”– which would have cost McDonald’s a fortune to license – and change the lyrics to “It’s the Most Terrible Time of the Year.” To accompany this soundtrack are a sequence of gruesome, life-threatening mishaps to illustrate how awful Christmas is – so come to McDonald’s instead.
It’s hard to imagine a worse example of an advertiser failing to read the room. They know perfectly well that, for their loyal and largely mainstream customers, Christmas is not the most terrible time of the year. Quite the opposite. For advertising to resonate with any audience, it must always be rooted in some kind of truth. Leaving aside the synthetic soullessness of the AI imagery, this ad was rooted in lies.
The cost to McDonald’s is almost incalculable. Apart from the eye-watering production and music licensing costs, the ad will have done enormous damage to their brand. They tried to attack people’s joy, pleasure and treasured beliefs. At Christmas, people don’t want processed burgers and fries. They want roast turkey, vegetables and all the trimmings. Because that – not McDonald’s – is the very definition of a happy meal.
