Is McDonald's Christmas ad worse than Coca-Cola's?

📰 NoGood News Vol. 108 | How Generative AI ads are taking over the market

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Welcome to NoGood News, your bi-weekly pulse on all things growth. We break down successful brand campaigns, provide you with the best guides for all things growth marketing, and share emerging trends and insights to keep you ahead of the curve. Plus, exclusive interviews with some of the best in the game.

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Here's a quick TL;DR of what's below:

• The McDonald’s Christmas ad fiasco: Due to the rise in popularity of generated AI ads, McDonald’s decided to jump on the bandwagon and drop their own version for the holidays. The only problem is that they were met with backlash. But was that backlash intentional?

• Blending paid and organic social: Paid social is your first impression at scale, but organic is where the relationship actually develops. Both only reach their full potential when they operate as a unified ecosystem, shaping how people discover your brand, connect with it, and ultimately see themselves reflected in it.

• Data bias in growth marketing: Data bias has existed long before the integration of AI into the systems and platforms we use every day; however, the introduction of artificial intelligence has led to a shift in how we look at and understand data bias. Now, you need to recognize your data biases early before they become detrimental to your efforts and costly to replace.

Ready? Let's get into it. 

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🍟 The McDonald’s Christmas Ad Fiasco

The truth behind the McDonald’s Christmas ad

McDonald’s just made an AI Christmas ad and it’s somehow worse than Coca-Cola’s.

The ad follows a bunch of Christmas scenarios that go wrong, which lead everyone to spend Christmas at McDonald’s.

But to top it all off, they AI-generated the entire ad.

After watching Coca-Cola’s AI Christmas ads get destroyed by the entire internet for the last two years, how did anyone think this was a good idea?

McDonald’s is taking tone-deaf marketing to a whole new level, but that might actually be the goal.

Because right now, brands would rather have you talk about them than like them.

AI marketing has become a sort of rage-bait contest where raw attention is valued higher than creating brand affinity.

So if attention was their only goal? Mission accomplished.

But just recently, they decided to take down the video on YouTube after turning off their comments.

It seems like not all attention is good attention, and when you’re a brand as big as McDonald’s, we can’t help but wonder, is sacrificing decades of brand affinity and trust worth 15 minutes of attention?

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📱 Blending paid and organic social

The benefits of blending paid and organic social in growth marketing

Benefits of Combining Paid & Organic Social in Growth Marketing

1. Quality through community: People rarely make purchase decisions based on a single ad. Instead, they engage in a layered process of searching, browsing, observing (and, most critically) feeling. A strong organic footprint across social, blogs, and other owned channels doesn’t just build visibility, it builds trust.

2. Efficiency through identity: Paid ads will get people in the door fast, but not as efficiently if those ads aren’t backed by a brand that feels trustworthy, relatable, and authentic. If you combine paid and organic social, though, you extend your brand across much more of the user journey, and make the whole thing feel a lot less transactional.

3. Compounding creative strategy: Your paid performance data is a goldmine for insights and so is your organic performance data! What you can learn from performance data across paid and organic has value not just for each respective discipline, but for landing pages, blog strategy, and even product copy. The more you reuse what works and share innovations and learnings across the team, the more efficient your creative pipeline becomes.

4. Lifecycle optimization: When blended, paid and organic social media help support a full customer lifecycle. For example, someone might follow your brand on TikTok after seeing a cool or thoughtful video, only to later be served a targeted ad for your new product that feels surprisingly relevant to their current needs. This isn’t because of luck, but because of their connection with your brand’s community, and they are now primed to take a meaningful action on your paid ad.

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📈 Data bias in growth marketing

How to avoid data bias in growth marketing

4 of the most common types of data bias in growth marketing

1. Datasets that include negative consumer behavior: We often leverage predictive models to optimize our audience targets. However, feeding an algorithm data that only represents your “ideal” customer can create a confirmation bias loop as it learns to prioritize people who look like your past best customers, potentially overlooking new, high-value segments or future trends.

2. Platform bias & persona validation: This issue is a form of dataset shift or population drift, where the audience on one platform may not be representative of your broader target market. To overcome platform bias, you should diversify the platforms in your go-to-market strategy.

3. Confirmation bias in marketing: Confirmation bias occurs when marketers favor information and actions that support existing ideas with little to no predictive value. In order to avoid this bias, you need to question your idea of ideal customers every so often. You can use Audience Insights from Facebook and Google Audience Insights to learn more about your site visitors and find other common denominators that can lead you to new and promising customer segments.

4. Predictive lead scoring: Sales teams often hunt for the biggest and easiest leads to close, which can lead to a bias toward revenue opportunities over long-term customer health. A modern approach involves building a lead scoring model that incorporates metrics beyond revenue.

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🎙️ Q&A with an expert

A bi-weekly interview series with the best in the game

Quinn Sherr, Content Creation Manager

Q: We’ve been seeing an increasing number of companies drop AI-generated ads. Do you think “taste” will become more important than technical execution?

A: I think taste and technical execution go hand-in-hand in a world with generative AI. It’s like taking photos with a polaroid in 2025. While in the 80s that would just be how you take photos, today it’s a statement. Sure, you could take that photo on your iPhone and have it ready immediately. But there’s a feeling with the polaroid that your iPhone just can’t replicate. It’s the same with AI ads. In a world where you can skip all the guardrails and make an ad in 5 minutes, those who choose to do it “the old fashioned way” will be making a statement in doing so. Even though that’s previously just how we did it.

Q: What’s one decision brands should make now to prepare for the future of generative AI advertising?

A: Brands need to decide what matters more: being talked about, or being liked. So far, these “AI ads” have only been met with backlash — and the tides don’t show any signs of shifting. That said, if McDonald’s or Coca-Cola had made their ads without generative AI… there’s a good chance nobody would’ve really talked about them. Not all publicity is good publicity, but there is a lot of publicity for the brands who are choosing to make these ads. Will your brand trade your trust for their 15 minutes of publicity?

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✍️ We wish we wrote this

Articles that caught our eye these past 2 weeks:

• 2026 may be the year everyone deals with trend fatigue

• The art of watching others perform while performing for them

• SEO and marketing predictions for 2026

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👀 Keeping up on the socials

Because IYKYK is better than FOMO:

• Pantone just destroyed their brand’s reputation with this one color

• The top tone-deaf marketing stunts of 2025

• Solidcore drama explained

• Youtube Recap versus Youtube Rewind

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