When McDonald’s released its AI-generated holiday ad declaring the holidays “The Most Terrible Time of the Year,” the backlash was immediate. Many were quick to blame AI fatigue or plain old resistance to artificial intelligence. But early findings from Fort Worth-based GlassView suggest that explanation doesn’t tell the whole story.
“It wasn’t about people rejecting AI,” said GlassView Founder and CEO J. Brooks. “It was about cognitive misalignment. The spot didn’t match how people already understand McDonald’s.”
GlassView is a technology company that measures consumers’ responses to advertising using neuro-sensing wearable technology. Instead of asking people what they think after the fact, the company looks at how the brain responds in real time, before social filtering or narrative revision sets in.
“We don’t actually know why we like what we like,” Brooks explained. “We feel something first, then we tell ourselves a story about it. Traditional research captures the story. We go to the brain to understand the decision.”
Using electroencephalogram data, or EEG, GlassView measures electrical activity associated not only with emotional response, but also with attention, engagement, trust, memory encoding, and cognitive resonance.
“Because of advances in wearable neurotechnology, we can now measure how people process media in the wild,” Brooks said. “Thousands of participants are already wearing these bands to track focus, mental health, athletic performance, and brain health. From that, we can see what actually lands and what doesn’t.”
In the case of McDonald’s, what didn’t land was not simply tone, but cognition. McDonald’s is one of the most deeply recognized brands in the world, and how people think of the brand has been reinforced over generations through repetition, ritual, and cultural presence. When a brand like that breaks the pattern, the brain flags it immediately.
Some of McDonald’s most successful campaigns understood this instinctively.
The launch of the beloved “I’m Lovin’ It” campaign in 2003 from DDB Chicago was not a reinvention of the arches, but a continuation of what the brand already represented in people’s minds. It gave viewers a familiar emotional and cognitive place to land. The instantly recognizable ‘Ba da ba ba baa’ jingle reinforced comfort, pleasure, and accessibility rather than disrupting it. The campaign strengthened an existing relationship rather than asking consumers to change what they already believed about the brand.
GlassView’s early findings suggest the AI-generated holiday ad failed because it violated that internal logic. The brain didn’t know where to place it. “When a brand has decades of meaning attached to it, people don’t consciously think about that meaning,” Brooks said. “But the brain expects consistency. When that expectation is broken, it creates friction.”
This is where GlassView’s technology moves beyond advertising effectiveness and into something more important. The same neurometric data used to evaluate media also support research into brain health and mental well-being. Specific neural patterns can signal cognitive decline years before traditional diagnosis, allowing for earlier intervention.
That dual purpose is deeply personal for Brooks. He and his husband are raising two young children, and he sees this technology as a way to better understand not just people as consumers, but people on a true human level.
“We’ve never had more data about behavior and less understanding of why people behave the way they do,” he said. “Mental health, isolation, addiction. These are all rooted in how the brain processes experience. If you can measure that, you can start to improve it.”
For marketers, GlassView represents an opportunity to move beyond traditional research models and embrace an emerging class of brain technology designed to reach consumers at a far deeper level than surveys, focus groups, or standard behavioral data ever could.
“I’ve always intuitively understood that marketing has historically been relegated to softer sciences like sociology and psychology,” noted Brooks. “Who’s my target audience? What are their demographics? Maybe a bit of what makes them tick from focus groups. But with advances in biotech and neurotechnology, we now have the opportunity to move into harder sciences, to understand people’s physiology, their biochemical and neurochemical makeup, and why they make the decisions they do.”
In the age of AI, GlassView is betting that the future of media and marketing will not belong to those who generate the most content, but to those who understand how people think, feel, and form meaning at a subconscious level. As automation accelerates, insight into the human brain may become the most valuable differentiator of all.