🎄 McDonald’s pulls AI holiday ad

McDonald’s thought an AI-made Christmas ad would feel fresh. Instead, it got roasted. After a wave of mockery in the Netherlands, the brand quietly pulled the spot, proving that AI ads might be easy to make, but not so easy to get right. Let’s dive in!

In today’s insights:

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

Evolving AI: McDonald’s removed an AI-made holiday ad after heavy public backlash in the Netherlands.

McDonald’s Netherlands quietly pulled a 45-second AI-generated Christmas ad after it sparked widespread mockery online. The spot leaned into fast cuts and surreal visuals common in AI video. Viewers called it unpleasant and cheap, leading McDonald’s to disable comments and remove the video. The production team defended the work, citing weeks of effort and heavy post-production, framing it as a serious film experiment rather than a novelty.

Missed it? No worries. Someone clipped the video, and the full version is available to watch here →

Brands are learning the hard way that AI in glossy campaigns isn’t a free upgrade, it’s a trust risk: McDonald’s joins Coca-Cola and Valentino on the list of big names roasted for AI-heavy holiday spots that look cheap, off-brand, or just uncomfortable, even though they took weeks of human labor to patch up AI glitches. Surveys over the past year show a big gap between marketer hype and audience comfort, with most consumers feeling uneasy about AI-led ads and many saying these spots feel annoying or inauthentic.

Evolving AI: Average marketing teams have access to 14 different AI-powered tools, but most of them solve narrow problems in isolation.

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Evolving AI: New data shows enterprise AI use is saving many knowledge workers close to an hour each day.

OpenAI’s enterprise report blends anonymized product data with surveys from 9,000 employees across nearly 100 paying companies. Most users report faster work or better output, with IT, engineering, and marketing seeing the biggest gains. Message volume, seats, and advanced model usage are all rising sharply, with tech, healthcare, and manufacturing leading adoption. Custom GPTs and projects now handle a meaningful share of enterprise workflows, though many users still skip advanced features.

OpenAI’s numbers line up with a broader pattern in recent research, where controlled studies see double-digit productivity bumps from gen AI, especially for routine writing, support, and analysis tasks, but mostly for people who actually bake it into their workflow rather than poke it a few times a week. The bigger story is the split: a small group of “frontier” workers and firms are racing ahead with custom tools, training, and AI-by-default processes, while everyone else pays for licenses and barely moves faster.

In this video, Sam Altman explains why technology like ChatGPT could become the biggest equalizer we’ve ever had, and how his perspective has shifted as AI moves from experiment to everyday reality. Worth watching if you want to understand where this is all heading, and why it could matter for you sooner than you think.

Evolving AI: The EU is investigating whether Google’s AI training practices harm competition.

The European Commission has opened a competition investigation into Google’s use of online content for AI training. Regulators are assessing whether web publishers and YouTube creators are forced to allow their content to train models like Gemini, without fair payment or opt-out options. The case looks at whether Google gives itself access to content that rival AI developers cannot legally or practically use.

This probe is really about who controls the AI training data tap. If Brussels forces Google to pay for or limit how it uses publisher and YouTube content, every AI team will need cleaner licenses, clearer opt outs, and real contracts instead of scraping first and apologising later. That can push more money to newsrooms and creators but it may also raise the cost of building strong models, lock premium data into a few big deals, and make “data strategy” just as important as model architecture for anyone building AI in Europe.

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