Antes de crear un anuncio navideño con IA: lo que enseñaron las dos últimas temporadas

Adobe expects Americans to spend a record $275.1 billion online between November 1 and December 31, 6.7% more than last year. Some of the ads chasing it will be made with AI, and the last two Decembers showed how that can go. Coca-Cola made an AI holiday film, was criticized, and came back the next year with another. McDonald's in the Netherlands posted one and took it down within days. Read closely, neither story is really about the tool.

We are a film studio that has made ads since 2017 and directs AI engines in production today, so we have a stake in this. Opinions are marked as opinions, and every outside fact is in the sources at the end.

The season in numbers

• $275.1 billion: forecast US online spend from November 1 to December 31, up 6.7% (Adobe, September 28).
• Thanksgiving is November 26, Black Friday November 27 and Cyber Monday November 30. Adobe expects $12.9 billion online on Black Friday and $15.1 billion on Cyber Monday, the biggest day of the season.
• $47.5 billion across Cyber Week, the five days from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday.
• 57.4% of the season's online spend is forecast to come through mobile devices, rising to a record 63% on Thanksgiving Day.
• $1.70 trillion to $1.71 trillion in total US holiday retail sales from November through January, up 4.0% to 4.8% (Deloitte, September 10).

These are forecasts, not results. The line from Deloitte worth keeping is about behavior: shoppers are making "deliberate choices about how they spend". A deliberate shopper is not won over by a film that looks as if nobody cared about it.

Coca-Cola, 2024 and 2025: criticized, then back

In November 2024 Coca-Cola released AI remakes of its 1995 spot "Holidays Are Coming", one from each of three AI studios: Secret Level, Silverside AI and Wild Card. NBC News reported that people online called the ad "soulless". A year later the brand returned with its "Refresh Your Holidays" campaign: new AI versions of the same spot, made with Secret Level and Silverside AI, built around the red trucks, polar bears, penguins, puppies and a Santa opening a bottle.

Some details made fewer headlines. Coca-Cola's own release quoted Pratik Thakar, its head of generative AI: "Creative ambition, direction and thought leadership has and always will be human-led". It added that the music was performed and sung by real artists. And System1, a firm that tests ads on viewer panels, gave the 2025 film 5.9 stars, the maximum its model awards, concluding that "using AI doesn't hurt ordinary viewers' enjoyment of the ad at all". System1 added two caveats: holiday ads tend to score higher than ordinary ones, and a few negative comments suggest Coca-Cola was wise not to mention AI in the ad itself.

Our reading: the online conversation and the living room can disagree. System1 credits the score to consistency: the Santa, trucks, snow and music Coca-Cola has used for decades. It also points to one change. The onlookers, smiling people in scarves in the 2024 version, became animals in 2025, and System1 says the swap works. In our production experience, animals and familiar objects forgive small generation errors more readily than human faces do. That last point is studio experience, not a measured finding.

McDonald's Netherlands, 2025: gone within days

In December 2025 McDonald's in the Netherlands posted a 45-second AI Christmas film on YouTube called "The most terrible time of the year". It showed holiday mishaps and suggested hiding out at McDonald's until January. NBC News reported it went up on a Saturday and was gone by Wednesday. The company said the film was meant to reflect the stressful moments of the season, and acknowledged that for many of its guests it is "the most wonderful time of the year".

Melanie Bridge, chief executive of the production company The Sweetshop Films, defended the work in a LinkedIn post she later deleted. As AFP and NBC News reported, she wrote that the hours "far exceeded a traditional shoot": ten people, full-time, for five weeks. By her account, AI did not make the film quick. The craft hours were real.

Our reading: the idea asked a December audience to laugh at December. That is a hard brief in any medium. Made with a look many viewers already associate with shortcuts, it had less goodwill to spend, and it ran out fast.

The brands going the other way

Some brands now market the absence of AI. In April 2024 Dove committed to "never using AI in place of real people in its advertising". In October 2025 Aerie pledged not to use AI-generated people or bodies, and its chief marketing officer, Stacey McCormick, told Marketing Brew that "realness becomes special" when everything else is generated. Aerie's fourth-quarter 2025 sales were up 23% on a year earlier, though nobody has shown the pledge caused that.

The point for everyone else: "made by real people" is now a position a competitor can take against you. A careless AI film hands it to them.

What audiences say

In an IAB study published in January, 82% of US ad executives said they believe Gen Z and Millennial consumers feel positive about AI-generated ads. 45% of those consumers do. Yet 73% of them said knowing an ad was made with AI would raise or not change their likelihood to buy. We look at that gap in filmito.io/en/blog/do-people-like-ai-ads-the-82-45-gap.

Five rules for a holiday film

These come from our own client work, not from a survey. Read them as advice, not research.

• The product is real and exact. Real photographs of the actual pack, the right color, the right number of buttons. Prices, offers and legal lines are set in the edit, because text inside generated footage garbles. Our full checklist is at filmito.io/en/blog/ai-product-ad-accuracy-checklist.
• Warmth comes from a story, not from snow. One person, one small moment, one turn. A sleigh, a fireplace and a logo is a mood board, not a film.
• No crowds of smiling strangers. Generated faces are where viewers look hardest and where models drift first. Use fewer people, give each one a reason to be in frame, and let hands, objects, animals and places carry the rest.
• Sound is designed, not added. On our projects you approve the script and the sound before any footage is made. A borrowed carol under generated pictures is the quickest way to look like every other ad in the feed.
• Someone outside the team watches first, muted, on a phone. If they cannot tell you what was sold and why it felt warm, the film is not finished.

Where AI earns its place in December

Winter you cannot shoot in October: a snowed-in street, a cabin at dusk, a city lit for the season, with no wait for weather. A product hero shot in a world built around the product. And editions: in our archive, 454 delivered files are vertical or short-form editions and 33 projects shipped in more than one language (filmito.io/en/ai-ads-report).

Our Cuddle Buddies Bedtime film is not a holiday ad, but it has the shape we mean. Before a young woman heads out, she starts the app on her phone, and the dog and the cat settle while she is gone. By bedtime all three are asleep together under one lamp. Twenty-two seconds, one small turn, the brand at the end. Watch it at filmito.io/en/case-studies?play=native-cuddle-buddies.

If your film puts a generated person on screen

Since June 9, 2026, New York has required a conspicuous disclosure when an ad features a "synthetic performer", a digitally created person who is not recognizable as any real individual, and whoever creates or produces the ad knows it is there. The law firm Crowell & Moring reads it as applying to any company whose ads reach consumers in New York, wherever the company is based. Civil penalties are $1,000 for a first violation and $5,000 for each one after. Audio-only ads, and AI used only to translate a human performer, are exempt.

This is general information, not legal advice. If your holiday film shows a generated family and will run in New York, ask counsel how to word and place the disclosure, and plan it into the edit. The IAB finding above suggests an honest label costs less than many brands fear.

A realistic calendar, counted back from Black Friday

Count back from the day the film must be live, not from Black Friday itself, and leave time for each platform's ad review. On our Launch plan the steps look like this.

• This week: decide the brief. Who the film is for, what they should do, and what must never appear. Gather real product photographs.
• Next: approve the script, then the voice and the music. Nothing is generated before both are agreed.
• Three days later: the first cut.
• Then plan for the median, not the best case. Across 742 of our projects with numbered cuts, 19.0% were approved on the first cut and the median was approved on cut 3, the first cut plus the two revision rounds Launch includes. Plan on roughly a week of back and forth.
• Last: the vertical and other editions, the upload and the platform review, with days in hand before the date that matters.

Launch is $595 for 15 seconds, $895 for 30 and $1,495 for 60, with 16:9 and 9:16 in 4K (filmito.io/en/pricing). If the date is close, a 48-hour rush adds 40% to the base price. It suits a decided brief and does not rescue an undecided one, which is why we sometimes decline it (filmito.io/en/blog/48-hour-rush-ad-strategy).

If you only do one thing

Decide the vertical edition at the script stage and review it on a phone before anything else. With 57.4% of the season's online spend forecast to come through mobile devices, the phone is where much of the season is bought. A horizontal film cropped late is where holiday ads lose their faces and their product.

“Viewers do not ask which engine made a holiday film. They notice whether someone cared.”

If you are planning a holiday film, send the product and the date you need it live through filmito.io/en/see-your-ad. We reply within one business day with the idea, the price and the date. If the date is not realistic, the reply will say so.