Coca-Cola Kept Its AI Ad. McDonald’s Pulled Its Own.

In November 2025, Coca-Cola released its second AI-produced holiday ad in two years. A month later, McDonald’s Netherlands pulled its own a few days after it went live. Both brands worked with specialised studios. Both put teams and weeks of work into it. Only one kept its ad on air.

Coca-Cola: a criticised first attempt, a more demanding second one

In 2024, Coca-Cola remade its 1995 classic, “Holidays Are Coming”, with three AI studios. According to one of them, Silverside, the project took two months, against roughly a year with traditional filming and CGI. Among viewers, a Truescope survey found 83% neutral reactions. Among creatives, the ad was attacked hard for its craftsmanship.

The brand did not back off. It raised the bar. For the 2025 holidays, two new AI versions of the same classic were produced by the studios Secret Level and Silverside AI, and aired in the United States only. Coca-Cola’s global VP of generative AI, Pratik Thakar, put the difference this way to The Hollywood Reporter: last year people criticised the craftsmanship; this year it is “ten times better”. Secret Level’s founder estimates the ad took about 20 people, against at least 50 for a project of that complexity done the conventional way.

Coca-Cola’s own release is explicit on one point: AI serves production and execution, not direction. “Creative ambition, direction and thought leadership has and always will be human-led,” the company writes. The music is performed by real artists.

Nobody pressed a button

Team size as estimated by the studios

AI productionConventional production

Nobody pressed a button

Item	Value
Coca-Cola AI ad, 2025	≈ 20 people
Comparable project, conventional	50+
McDonald’s NL AI ad, 2025	≈ 10 people

McDonald’s Netherlands: pulled within days

In early December 2025, McDonald’s Netherlands released a 45-second ad on a contrarian theme: Christmas as “the most terrible time of the year”. Presents falling off car roofs, carollers losing their sheet music, Santa stuck in traffic, people slipping on ice, and a simple payoff: hide out in McDonald’s until January.

The reaction was fast and harsh: “unsettling”, “creepy”, “poorly edited”. The ad came down from YouTube a few days later. McDonald’s said it was meant to reflect the stressful moments of the season, while acknowledging that for many of its guests it is “the most wonderful time of the year”. The CEO of the production studio, The Sweetshop, defended the work: around ten people, full time, for several weeks. “It’s never about replacing craft, it’s about expanding the toolbox.”

Same technology, different result

What follows is a reading, not an established finding. Both projects had access to comparable tools and professional teams. What differed were three decisions made before anything was generated.

The subject. Coca-Cola asked AI to rebuild a world the audience has loved for thirty years: lit-up trucks, stylised animals, a Santa based on the brand’s archival paintings. McDonald’s asked it to render humans in chaos: faces, falling bodies, crowds. That is exactly what models still render worst. We listed why here.

The tone. A cynical Christmas ad, already risky on a real shoot, gets more fragile when every slightly odd face confirms the unease instead of defusing it.

The quality bar. Coca-Cola treated the 2024 criticism as a specification. The second version was judged on its craft, not on the fact that it exists.

What it means for a smaller business

You will not produce a holiday ad at Coca-Cola’s scale. But the same three decisions apply to a 30-second video for a restaurant or a manufacturer.

Pick subjects AI renders well. Products, places, equipment, reconstructions, impossible camera moves. Keep real faces for the moments where trust rests on an actual person.

Set the bar before launch. An ad that looks like AI costs trust. The numbers are here. If a shot does not pass, it does not ship.

Keep a human in charge of tone. Even the “fast” AI ads of big brands took teams of 10 to 20 people for weeks. AI changes the cost structure. It does not replace direction.

The tool was the same on both sides. The difference was who decided, and when.