To relaunch Slice soda, the BarkleyOKRP agency didn’t make an ad. It created a fake FM radio station in Los Angeles. Real frequency, real signal, a month on air.
But everything is fictitious. The 40 tracks, the bands — Lipstick Trigger, Glacier Fang, Bubble Punks —, the host DJ Bev, the album covers, right up to the sentimental call-in show hosted by Dr. Poplov. All generated by AI.
120 million impressions. CPM 60% more effective. Award “AI Creative Studio of the Year” 2026.
The sentence that sums it all up, from the creative director: “AI is here to serve the creative idea, not to be the creative idea.”
That’s exactly the tightrope:
→ The lazy version: a classic spot with a licensed song. AI would have been useless.
→ The ambitious version: an entire fictional universe, 40 tracks in 3 weeks, a phantom station haunting LA’s FM. Impossible without AI. Impossible without humans.
May Day, we celebrate work.
And the most interesting work in 2026, in my opinion, isn’t the one AI does for us. It’s the one it enables us to invent.
Happy May Day to everyone, don’t forget your sprigs of lily of the valley.
The full story here: https://business.google.com/us/think/ai-excellence/ai-advertising-campaign-nostalgia-marketing/
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