Aside from the fact that they are just bad, I know why people are reacting so negatively to the Coke and McDonald’s AI holiday commercials. I have a story that I think will illustrate the outpouring of rage.
This isn’t my story, but it stuck with me when I heard it years ago at a Creative Mornings event at an agency in Downtown Crossing. If anyone who was there remembers who told this story, please tag them below so I can give them credit!
The keynote speaker at that Creative Mornings gathering was an agency creative director. He told us about his very first design job, interning at a small agency that served mostly local clients and small businesses. The first job he was given was to design a big “0% Down” sign for a car dealership. You know the kind - the little tent-shaped signs that sit on the roofs of cars lining the road in the most boring part of every second-tier city in America. It was a waste of a skilled designer's time. But he went and spent the five minutes it took to throw the stupid thing together in Illustrator, then brought a proof over to his CD.
The CD glanced at it and then asked the intern “Why are you here?”
The intern was confused. “You told me to design a 0% down sign. I did. Here it is for you to approve.”
“No,” the CD responded. “Why are you here? At this agency?”
“What?” The intern felt like it should be pretty obvious why he was there. He was there for the same reason every agency intern in history has ever done a design internship. You don’t graduate from a design program without an internship. You definitely don’t get an agency job after graduation without one.
“Because if you don’t give a shit, I can’t use you.”
The intern stayed quiet. He wasn’t sure why he was getting told off.
“I need you to give a shit about every single piece of work you do. It might be bullshit. This 0% sign is a bullshit project. But that doesn’t matter, because it’s important to your client. It’s more important to our client’s customers.
“If you don’t care, it will be obvious to the client, and it will be obvious to their customers. If you don’t care, why should they care? No matter how stupid you think a project is, I need you to treat it like the most important thing in the world while you’re working on it, because our clients and their customers can tell. If it’s important to you, it’ll look that way to them. If it’s not, they’ll know. If you can’t do that, then you need to get the fuck out of this industry, because that is the first and only rule.”
That story stuck with me, and I think it illustrates way AI creative continues to fail.
The problems with the Coke and McDonald’s AI ads are legion (poor quality, bad structure, garbage editing, exceptionally annoying music even for holiday ads, incredibly poor timing given the cultural zeitgeist), but both brands have made bad commercials before. The reaction to these two is unique. Just go look at the nearly ten thousand comments on the Coke ad. All of them are negative. All of them. When was the last time anything in America inspired the same reaction from literally everyone? Even Pepsi’s disastrous Kendall Jenner ad had its defenders.
The reason the response to these commercials is so consistent is because they display a clear lack of care. It’s instantly obvious to anyone watching them that their “creators” don’t give a shit about the brand they’re allegedly selling (given that the Coke logo is distorted in nearly every shot in which it appears, this seems abundantly clear). They certainly don’t care about or respect their customers or they would never have presented them with something so shoddy.
These ads go way beyond mere slop. These are two of the most well-known and well-loved brands on the planet, and both of them decided that their holiday message to their customers was “This is the amount of effort we are willing to put in to retain you as customers, because we don’t care about you.”
No matter what your business does, your customer is the most important part of it. Everything you do should be for their benefit. That goes double for your marketing. If you don’t care about the story you tell your customers, they will notice, and they will stop caring about you.
No matter what industry you’re in, marketing matters. Storytelling matters. Showing your clients and customers that you care about what you do matters. If you can do that, your audience will tolerate an enormous number of mistakes, missteps, overhyped claims, and failed products. But as soon as you show them that you’ve stopped caring, they will walk away.
-Forest
About the Author
Forest Lee is a brand and marketing strategist with 20+ years of experience helping companies from startups to global enterprises find their voice, tell their story, and grow. He brings creative, data-driven strategy and automation industry expertise to help brands stand out.