It seems like a statement from The Sweetshop, who made the ad, has also been pulled.
This piece links to a Futurism article[0], which in turn links to "an incredibly defensive statement"[1] from the ad agency.
> “For seven weeks, we hardly slept, with up to 10 of our in-house AI and post specialists at The Gardening Club [our in-house AI engine] working in lockstep with the directors,” Sweetshop’s CEO wrote.
(Sounds more like sweatshop than sweetshop, but I digress.)
However, that "defensive statement" link is broken, and I see no sign of it on the linked site, but I did find this older lamentation[2] from The Sweetshop regarding AI, or more specifically regarding the attitude that AI should allow you to cut costs and fire people.
> Being asked to cut 20–30% of creative costs and labour under the banner of ‘AI’ is unimaginative at best, and corrosive at worst. It drains the value of human creativity and concentrates it in fewer and fewer hands, hollowing out the very industry it claims to improve.
How does this kind of work take 7 weeks for 10 people?
10 animators could hand-draw every frame of a 44 second ad in that time. They could spend an hour on each frame, completely trash and redo the entire commercial, take an extra week for meetings and rework, and still have time to spare.
Complete tangent but “in lockstep” really seems to be doing the rounds again as corpo speak. It honestly annoys me but I can’t explain why - maybe because they’re not a military but an ad production company.
The attempts by both this outfit and the one that did the Coke ad to walk the line of simultaneously touting what a labor saving device these models are while also trying desperately to make it seem like they did some actual work somewhere so they can also be respected as creatives is honestly hilarious.
Like I thought the whole point of these stupid things was that any John Q off the street could make awesome videos? If that's the case, then what in the utter hell is the point of a making of video featuring people playing at being creative?
Having spent enough time with marketing and PR folks, I really wouldn't be surprised if this supposed backlash is overhyped as a way to get more people interested in seeing the ad.
It's a bad ad and the AI just makes it worse. The song doesn't rhyme well, the lyrics doesn't make much sense (they feel very forced), the things they portray are mostly unrealistic/exaggerated, and the cherry on top is that McDonalds is somehow a respite from the chaos of Christmas. I've never once in my life thought of McD as somewhere comforting to go. It's just a bad ad period.
Also, no one wants a bad (probably also AI-generated) song about how terrible Christmas is. I'm not saying it's not terrible but no one wants a song about it.
It’s just a bad ad. People don’t want to hear a multinational corporation singing about Christmas being shitty. Whatever ad company made this should be forced to work retail during the season.
Who cares if it's AI made or not. It's funny even as it is offensive to many. One thing I've always wondered, with outrage over ads like this, would this (old) ad now be considered funny or offensive?
> As quoted in Futurism, she said the production process took "seven weeks" where the team "hardly slept" and created "thousands of takes - then shaped them in the edit just as we would on any high-craft production".
This isn't really a field where you get points for effort. The end product was extremely bad, which is ultimately what matters.
OMG! The song is literally called "The Most Terrible Time of the Year"!
They managed to say something disheartening to everyone on Earth except first-act Scrooges and Grinches. Doubt Ebenezier ever set foot in a McDonald's, and Grinch never left his mountaintop home, so... [Yes, I know not everyone celebrates Christmas, but that song title is just a massive dump on your day, regardless.]
What's their next marketing step? "Everything causes cancer, so you might as well get it from McDonald's!"
On top of it being visually unappealing, I hate ads that take the misanthrope route to appeal to people’s worst nature. Wow, you hate Christmas, thanks McD.
As much as I hate McDonalds and think they should go bankrupt, and as much as I hate ads in general, I enjoyed this one. It's funny, it has lots of small clips of things going wrong one after the other. Compared to the standard corporate ads with a long family- and Jesus-oriented message that pretend to give some significance to Christmas besides how it affects their profits, this one is bold and different.
Who cares if it's made by AI and has obvious mistakes? It's not the new Star Wars movie where it's expected to focus on VFX issues. It's an ad - a 30 second clip that will run for a while to get people to buy products. If you can make an ad with AI for less money, why do it without AI?
As for the message - we need more of this. It's kind of a taboo to hate Christmas, but I loathe it and everything about it. And so do many people. Maybe they won't say that in the office or around religious family members, but we do exist.
You can't escape the shitty Christmas jingles that start in late November in almost all stores. You can't escape The tacky decorations, especially the blinking lights. If you mention the wasteful spending of taxpayer money on city decorations, people look at you as if you're crazy. You have to fight the implied obligation to participate in the celebration and to exchange gifts; having to tell people not to buy me anything. And the religious aspect of it, even though it started as a pagan holiday - people showing off how Christian they are even though a lot of them only remember their faith in twice a year. And finally, the commercialization of it - corporations pretending to care about it while trying to make everyone buy more products...
> It's an ad - a 30 second clip that will run for a while to get people to buy products. If you can make an ad with AI for less money, why do it without AI?
> Who cares
If it has mistakes and is overall a shitty ad I imagine it'll be less persuasive in getting people to buy the product. I have to imagine someone cares very much about that.
Why's it so mean spirited? I don't see that many ads, but the few I've seen lately are just insulting.
Apple intelligence: "why try to make an effort for others?"
McDonalds germany: "Christmas sucks actually, but you know what doesn't?"
Great sample size of 2 I know... still enough to make me wonder if ad agencies are just playing a game of chicken between themselves to see who can spit on the face of customers the most before they realize they're being spit on.
McDonald's case is pretty funny, because their JP branch on social media is on a streak of well-received PR stunts where they just grab whoever made a popular song/meme over the years and pay them to redo it as an ad (+ releasing an original song for their moon-viewing line of product that I do enjoy).
I've yet to see AI-generated video which _doesn't_ have this sort of problem; everything moves unnaturally and physics doesn't work properly. Unless it can shed that nightmarish quality, it's DOA, and it's not at all clear that it _can_, via current techniques.
I would actually wonder if AI generation of 3d models and movement instructions, coupled with a conventional physics engine, might be more viable, though it would obviously rule out attempts at photorealistic stuff.
This is going to end in an plague of video marketing material, the sort of professional looking creation that is too expensive currently to get wrong so the same advert is shown for months and sometimes repeated yearly.
Big brands are going to push multiple different adverts per week to a single market to see what sticks.
Perhaps. Watching my GenZ kids react to AI commercials during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, there was general revulsion. It seems many of them are seeking authenticity not uncanny. I know this would be an anathema in a board room where the cost of producing an amazing commercial via AI would make a C-suite sparkle with delight. No paid actors? No sound stage? No reshoots?
And yet, my kids reject it. It's odd. This is coming from a guy who loved watching frogs belch out the name of a beer company in the 90s....
Feels like a trial balloon. Yes, this one went badly. It was awful slop. But there will be another. And another. And I feel like for most people catching an ad on TV, the realisation that AI made it will decrease or won't bother them over time. The frog will be boiled.
What is especially bad about this ad? To me it seems no worse than the infernal Paintin Manning ad from last year or the State Farm Megan Trainor ad this year. If this was on rotation in NFL games it wouldn’t make me scramble for the mute button any faster than other ads.
Well, for a start it's a bad concept, but also the actual images are kinda nightmarish. The living teddy bear is particularly off-putting. And it's very obviously AI slop; physics is at best a mild suggestion.
No way anyone wants to hang out at McDonald's. If they're trying to make McDonald's a third space they need to do some remodeling first. Restaurants aren't warm and appealing; they're hard and easy to clean.
The one near me is always full of old people just hanging out. They use it in a similar way to many kids with starbucks, but they speak to each other instead of using laptops.
As others have suggested, you have a narrowly scoped view of the world and the use of McDonalds in it. While my city slicking McDonalds trips are usually not great, for many it’s actually very good.
Photographer and author Chris Arnade has written fairly extensively of his travels around the “forgotten” parts of America, which frequently lands him in McDonald’s stores that do serve as a community third-space, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/08/mcdonalds-c...
For some reason dutch advertising agencies went all-in on AI. There are tons of local commercials using the most terrible generated content and voiceovers.
It's not only a bad use of AI, as it has been discussed in other comments here.
The entire idea of the ad is Grinch-worthy. It was conceived and directed by someone who hates the season. It makes you want to close the browser, not going out to eat.
I am as tired of AI slop as everyone else but I think the backlash to this is way too exaggerated. Commercials are already "slop." There is no expectation of quality at all. The average Christmas commercial involves a bunch of elves singing "Taking Care of Business" while dancing in front of office supplies.
This commercial sucked because nobody wants to hear "it's the most terrible time of year." I don't really care if they used AI.
I think this one was especially bad because a massive corporation can't be arsed to do better. Like, Apple exaggerates a lot on their advertising, but at least there's some heart to it. (Coming from someone that doesn't like Apple.)
Exactly. Most ads are cringy and rubbish. This concept could easily have been made with real actors and a VFX crew and been equally as shitty.
I find people complaining about bad ads odd. Do people want good ads? Do they want to be engaged as they're being sold Pepsi? I work hard to avoid ads, their quality isn't even a factor for me.
> As quoted in Futurism, she said the production process took "seven weeks" where the team "hardly slept" and created "thousands of takes - then shaped them in the edit just as we would on any high-craft production".
How else are you going to justify what I assume is a 5-6 figure invoice for essentially doing nothing.
> "This wasn't an AI trick," she said. "It was a film."
Unfortunately you can't trick us with this nonsense. I am pretty sure no editing software was used beyond hammering on a prompt for a weekend.
This is one of those moments that will look silly in the future.
The ad sucks because it's cynical and poorly made. People would have complained on this basis alone. The ad also sucks because current generative AI is mass plagiarism.
I am pretty sure all this nuance will be lost on people of the future though. Even right now video ads don't reach audiences like they used to. Maybe that will be another layer for people to fail to wrap their heads around and laugh about.
What is the actual complaint here? Are people demanding commercials be beautiful? Before being AI slop, it is marketing slop. Why are they demanding 'soul' from an ad in 2025? Everything in this late-stage capitalist landscape is slop. They could have filmed it with real actors (or just reprised a spot from 15 years ago) and it wouldn't make any difference.
Because it's the TV yelling at you something along the lines of "Hey look, we replaced the creativity of dozens of people with this shitty result from a prompt, your job is next."
The fact that it's so bad that it obviously doesn't adhere to any sort of quality standards we expect from humans is just adding an insult to injury. It tells people "AI doesn't even need to be better at your job than you to replace you."
Companies generally want their ads to not be horribly off-putting.
> They could have filmed it with real actors (or just reprised a spot from 15 years ago) and it wouldn't make any difference.
I mean, it was conceptually bad to start with, but also it has a lot of unsettling AI video stuff (in particular, broken physics) that you wouldn't get with a real ad.
It seems like a statement from The Sweetshop, who made the ad, has also been pulled.
This piece links to a Futurism article[0], which in turn links to "an incredibly defensive statement"[1] from the ad agency.
> “For seven weeks, we hardly slept, with up to 10 of our in-house AI and post specialists at The Gardening Club [our in-house AI engine] working in lockstep with the directors,” Sweetshop’s CEO wrote.
(Sounds more like sweatshop than sweetshop, but I digress.)
However, that "defensive statement" link is broken, and I see no sign of it on the linked site, but I did find this older lamentation[2] from The Sweetshop regarding AI, or more specifically regarding the attitude that AI should allow you to cut costs and fire people.
> Being asked to cut 20–30% of creative costs and labour under the banner of ‘AI’ is unimaginative at best, and corrosive at worst. It drains the value of human creativity and concentrates it in fewer and fewer hands, hollowing out the very industry it claims to improve.
[0] https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/mcdonalds-ai-ge...
[1] https://lbbonline.com/news/melanie-bridge-sweetshop-the-gard... (missing page, and the Wayback Machine doesn't have a copy)
[2] https://lbbonline.com/news/Damn-The-Race-to-the-Bottom-AI-Sh...
Seems like one could have created a cheaper, higher quality ad with real actors.
Of course, real actors have unions and part of the point of AI is to make labor weaker.
How does this kind of work take 7 weeks for 10 people?
10 animators could hand-draw every frame of a 44 second ad in that time. They could spend an hour on each frame, completely trash and redo the entire commercial, take an extra week for meetings and rework, and still have time to spare.
Complete tangent but “in lockstep” really seems to be doing the rounds again as corpo speak. It honestly annoys me but I can’t explain why - maybe because they’re not a military but an ad production company.
The attempts by both this outfit and the one that did the Coke ad to walk the line of simultaneously touting what a labor saving device these models are while also trying desperately to make it seem like they did some actual work somewhere so they can also be respected as creatives is honestly hilarious.
Like I thought the whole point of these stupid things was that any John Q off the street could make awesome videos? If that's the case, then what in the utter hell is the point of a making of video featuring people playing at being creative?
Having spent enough time with marketing and PR folks, I really wouldn't be surprised if this supposed backlash is overhyped as a way to get more people interested in seeing the ad.
If this was intentional PR, then someone wildly misread the room
they want more people to see it so they removed it from YouTube?
It worked
It's a bad ad and the AI just makes it worse. The song doesn't rhyme well, the lyrics doesn't make much sense (they feel very forced), the things they portray are mostly unrealistic/exaggerated, and the cherry on top is that McDonalds is somehow a respite from the chaos of Christmas. I've never once in my life thought of McD as somewhere comforting to go. It's just a bad ad period.
Also, no one wants a bad (probably also AI-generated) song about how terrible Christmas is. I'm not saying it's not terrible but no one wants a song about it.
It might be comforting in Europe sometimes. Some standalone McDonalds in Poland are very nice and comfortable.
It’s just a bad ad. People don’t want to hear a multinational corporation singing about Christmas being shitty. Whatever ad company made this should be forced to work retail during the season.
Who cares if it's AI made or not. It's funny even as it is offensive to many. One thing I've always wondered, with outrage over ads like this, would this (old) ad now be considered funny or offensive?
https://youtu.be/dBqhIVyfsRg?si=WQ44V1CXuuFMGnca
> As quoted in Futurism, she said the production process took "seven weeks" where the team "hardly slept" and created "thousands of takes - then shaped them in the edit just as we would on any high-craft production".
This isn't really a field where you get points for effort. The end product was extremely bad, which is ultimately what matters.
McDonald's championing the labour theory of value is a new one.
OMG! The song is literally called "The Most Terrible Time of the Year"!
They managed to say something disheartening to everyone on Earth except first-act Scrooges and Grinches. Doubt Ebenezier ever set foot in a McDonald's, and Grinch never left his mountaintop home, so... [Yes, I know not everyone celebrates Christmas, but that song title is just a massive dump on your day, regardless.]
What's their next marketing step? "Everything causes cancer, so you might as well get it from McDonald's!"
The song title basically ensured the audience would bounce before the uncanny eyeballs even appeared
On top of it being visually unappealing, I hate ads that take the misanthrope route to appeal to people’s worst nature. Wow, you hate Christmas, thanks McD.
As much as I hate McDonalds and think they should go bankrupt, and as much as I hate ads in general, I enjoyed this one. It's funny, it has lots of small clips of things going wrong one after the other. Compared to the standard corporate ads with a long family- and Jesus-oriented message that pretend to give some significance to Christmas besides how it affects their profits, this one is bold and different.
Who cares if it's made by AI and has obvious mistakes? It's not the new Star Wars movie where it's expected to focus on VFX issues. It's an ad - a 30 second clip that will run for a while to get people to buy products. If you can make an ad with AI for less money, why do it without AI?
As for the message - we need more of this. It's kind of a taboo to hate Christmas, but I loathe it and everything about it. And so do many people. Maybe they won't say that in the office or around religious family members, but we do exist.
You can't escape the shitty Christmas jingles that start in late November in almost all stores. You can't escape The tacky decorations, especially the blinking lights. If you mention the wasteful spending of taxpayer money on city decorations, people look at you as if you're crazy. You have to fight the implied obligation to participate in the celebration and to exchange gifts; having to tell people not to buy me anything. And the religious aspect of it, even though it started as a pagan holiday - people showing off how Christian they are even though a lot of them only remember their faith in twice a year. And finally, the commercialization of it - corporations pretending to care about it while trying to make everyone buy more products...
> Who cares
I think this sums up the feeling about this new era. Indeed, who cares?
Empathy is the biggest sin according to our new elites.
By the end of the day when you don’t care enough, you may finally start enjoying this AI slop.
> It's an ad - a 30 second clip that will run for a while to get people to buy products. If you can make an ad with AI for less money, why do it without AI?
> Who cares
If it has mistakes and is overall a shitty ad I imagine it'll be less persuasive in getting people to buy the product. I have to imagine someone cares very much about that.
It's funny, but shitty in attitude. It makes a great viral parody. It does not sell hamburgers.
That poster of a duck with a sledgeghammer getting ready to "PRESS ANY KEY" made me laugh, but IBM didn't put it out.
And to your point about AI: yeah, irrelevant. The ad sucks regardless.
Why's it so mean spirited? I don't see that many ads, but the few I've seen lately are just insulting.
Apple intelligence: "why try to make an effort for others?" McDonalds germany: "Christmas sucks actually, but you know what doesn't?"
Great sample size of 2 I know... still enough to make me wonder if ad agencies are just playing a game of chicken between themselves to see who can spit on the face of customers the most before they realize they're being spit on.
McDonald's case is pretty funny, because their JP branch on social media is on a streak of well-received PR stunts where they just grab whoever made a popular song/meme over the years and pay them to redo it as an ad (+ releasing an original song for their moon-viewing line of product that I do enjoy).
As bad as this is in conception and execution what I see is a blip on a path towards the new normal.
I've yet to see AI-generated video which _doesn't_ have this sort of problem; everything moves unnaturally and physics doesn't work properly. Unless it can shed that nightmarish quality, it's DOA, and it's not at all clear that it _can_, via current techniques.
I would actually wonder if AI generation of 3d models and movement instructions, coupled with a conventional physics engine, might be more viable, though it would obviously rule out attempts at photorealistic stuff.
This is going to end in an plague of video marketing material, the sort of professional looking creation that is too expensive currently to get wrong so the same advert is shown for months and sometimes repeated yearly.
Big brands are going to push multiple different adverts per week to a single market to see what sticks.
Get ready for the assault.
Perhaps. Watching my GenZ kids react to AI commercials during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, there was general revulsion. It seems many of them are seeking authenticity not uncanny. I know this would be an anathema in a board room where the cost of producing an amazing commercial via AI would make a C-suite sparkle with delight. No paid actors? No sound stage? No reshoots?
And yet, my kids reject it. It's odd. This is coming from a guy who loved watching frogs belch out the name of a beer company in the 90s....
If they can get to "normal". This was so uncanny valley and disjointed it was like a preview to a horror movie.
Feels like a trial balloon. Yes, this one went badly. It was awful slop. But there will be another. And another. And I feel like for most people catching an ad on TV, the realisation that AI made it will decrease or won't bother them over time. The frog will be boiled.
What is especially bad about this ad? To me it seems no worse than the infernal Paintin Manning ad from last year or the State Farm Megan Trainor ad this year. If this was on rotation in NFL games it wouldn’t make me scramble for the mute button any faster than other ads.
I thought similarly to you, until I saw it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abRie4vAvJ4
Well, for a start it's a bad concept, but also the actual images are kinda nightmarish. The living teddy bear is particularly off-putting. And it's very obviously AI slop; physics is at best a mild suggestion.
The difference is that those ads were annoying on purpose
No way anyone wants to hang out at McDonald's. If they're trying to make McDonald's a third space they need to do some remodeling first. Restaurants aren't warm and appealing; they're hard and easy to clean.
The one near me is always full of old people just hanging out. They use it in a similar way to many kids with starbucks, but they speak to each other instead of using laptops.
As others have suggested, you have a narrowly scoped view of the world and the use of McDonalds in it. While my city slicking McDonalds trips are usually not great, for many it’s actually very good.
Photographer and author Chris Arnade has written fairly extensively of his travels around the “forgotten” parts of America, which frequently lands him in McDonald’s stores that do serve as a community third-space, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/08/mcdonalds-c...
Yeah, it's tough to sell "gather here for warmth" when the chairs feel like they were engineered to speed-run customer turnover
Basically, "Clean with a hose" decor.
Nobody wants it, and we all have a sense of the dark future ahead. Why they think we would think this is an acceptable way to sell burgers is crazy.
Just watched it, the uncanny valley is a perfect match for their simulacra of food.
For some reason dutch advertising agencies went all-in on AI. There are tons of local commercials using the most terrible generated content and voiceovers.
It's not only a bad use of AI, as it has been discussed in other comments here.
The entire idea of the ad is Grinch-worthy. It was conceived and directed by someone who hates the season. It makes you want to close the browser, not going out to eat.
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abRie4vAvJ4
Several of the scenes in here are extremely similar to one from a year or two ago, which I think was to the same song.
How do you explain that an ad agency gets a contract from macdonalds and goes cheap on it? Is it greed or is it stupidity?
Consumers have a surprisingly good nose for when something was made to save time instead of to say something meaningful
Mickey D's disses Christmas.
Was the concept created by AI?
I am as tired of AI slop as everyone else but I think the backlash to this is way too exaggerated. Commercials are already "slop." There is no expectation of quality at all. The average Christmas commercial involves a bunch of elves singing "Taking Care of Business" while dancing in front of office supplies.
This commercial sucked because nobody wants to hear "it's the most terrible time of year." I don't really care if they used AI.
I think this one was especially bad because a massive corporation can't be arsed to do better. Like, Apple exaggerates a lot on their advertising, but at least there's some heart to it. (Coming from someone that doesn't like Apple.)
Exactly. Most ads are cringy and rubbish. This concept could easily have been made with real actors and a VFX crew and been equally as shitty.
I find people complaining about bad ads odd. Do people want good ads? Do they want to be engaged as they're being sold Pepsi? I work hard to avoid ads, their quality isn't even a factor for me.
P.T. Barnum once said, “There's no such thing as bad publicity”
a lot of folks talk about it, so, I am sure, somehwere some marketing guy is being congratulated
It seems that when you’re selling fast food you’re in a world very far away from the one where livelihoods are being threatened by AI
Not if your customer base can't afford to eat your food because they lost their jobs to AI.
Other than the clips/scenes being short I couldn't tell too much that it was AI.
> As quoted in Futurism, she said the production process took "seven weeks" where the team "hardly slept" and created "thousands of takes - then shaped them in the edit just as we would on any high-craft production".
How else are you going to justify what I assume is a 5-6 figure invoice for essentially doing nothing.
> "This wasn't an AI trick," she said. "It was a film."
Unfortunately you can't trick us with this nonsense. I am pretty sure no editing software was used beyond hammering on a prompt for a weekend.
>>This wasn't an AI trick," she said. "It was a film."
Even this statement reeks of chatGPT.
What can I say, I thought it was funny. But seeing it over and over could get annoying.
If the budget was USD10k it is actually good.
Weenies with no sense of humor. I found the ad hilarious, even though no ad on Earth could lure me to McDonald's.
Never mind the AI aspect, the message "Christmas sucks so hang out at McDonald's over the holiday period" is wack
This is one of those moments that will look silly in the future.
The ad sucks because it's cynical and poorly made. People would have complained on this basis alone. The ad also sucks because current generative AI is mass plagiarism.
I am pretty sure all this nuance will be lost on people of the future though. Even right now video ads don't reach audiences like they used to. Maybe that will be another layer for people to fail to wrap their heads around and laugh about.
Beyond the critique of the AI slop, what a rotten message that was. If their goal was to bum me out, they were successful.
McSlop
This is the slop that BBC failed to show you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-YwjXEVGo8
I've seen individual AI fans create these in minutes, hardly '"seven weeks" where the team "hardly slept" and created "thousands of takes"'.
That... doesn't bother me more than any other commercial.
Commercials are mostly dumb. This is another pretty dumb one. It has clunky AI just like plenty of other commercials have clunky traditional VFX.
Can't really see myself getting worked up about it?
If AI frees up VFX artists so they can work on movies rather than commercials, I'm all for that.
Holy shit that's awful.
This is worse than what the average college kid can do over a weekend. What garbage.
There's a link to the ad in the article (the linked text "The Advert"). It is, indeed, astonishingly bad, even for AI slop.
If an RNG god exists, it will manifest soon, thanks to genAI, lol.
What is the actual complaint here? Are people demanding commercials be beautiful? Before being AI slop, it is marketing slop. Why are they demanding 'soul' from an ad in 2025? Everything in this late-stage capitalist landscape is slop. They could have filmed it with real actors (or just reprised a spot from 15 years ago) and it wouldn't make any difference.
Because it's the TV yelling at you something along the lines of "Hey look, we replaced the creativity of dozens of people with this shitty result from a prompt, your job is next."
The fact that it's so bad that it obviously doesn't adhere to any sort of quality standards we expect from humans is just adding an insult to injury. It tells people "AI doesn't even need to be better at your job than you to replace you."
Companies generally want their ads to not be horribly off-putting.
> They could have filmed it with real actors (or just reprised a spot from 15 years ago) and it wouldn't make any difference.
I mean, it was conceptually bad to start with, but also it has a lot of unsettling AI video stuff (in particular, broken physics) that you wouldn't get with a real ad.
Executive dysfunction