“Slop” was named the 2025 word of the year. That tells you where AI and creativity stand right now.
With 86% of ad buyers using AI for creative production and only 13% of consumers trusting ads made entirely by AI, the industry is stuck in a middle ground that looks a lot like mediocrity. Brad Jones, Chief Creative Officer at BarkleyOKRP, thinks the problem isn’t the technology — it’s how people use it. And his agency’s work for Slice soda proves there’s a better path.
A fake radio station that felt completely real
When Slice — the ’80s soda brand now owned by Suja Life — came to BarkleyOKRP for its relaunch, the brief was to reach a generation obsessed with ’80s and ’90s nostalgia. The team’s response: build something that wasn’t possible in the actual ’80s and ’90s.
The result was 106.3 The Fizz FM, a fully AI-generated radio station featuring 40 original songs, fake band backstories, album cover art and an AI disc jockey named Bev. Everything was created using Google’s AI tools including Gemini, Imagen and Veo, along with Suno for music composition. The station broadcast on actual FM radio in Los Angeles for a month.
“It’s using AI as an enabler to serve the creative, not necessarily be the creative,” Jones says. “The idea didn’t come from AI. The idea was to use AI in an innovative way.”
When AI exposes who’s good and who’s faking it
Jones draws a clear line between AI-generated content and AI-enabled ideas. “What we’re seeing a lot of when we’re talking about AI slop is it’s idealists — all it is is content. It’s lacking the idea.”
He compares it to giving anyone with a laptop and internet access the power to create. Without strategic rigor, insight and what he calls “the gravity — the center of gravity, the idea” — the output is just more noise.
AI hasn’t created a creativity problem. It’s exposed who had strong ideas all along and who was coasting.
The one slide every CMO should ask for
For CMOs evaluating agencies, Jones has a direct answer: ask for an AI policy. “Every agency should have an AI policy. We have it on one slide. We can provide that to any client at a drop of a hat.”
He warns that procurement and marketers are asking about AI from the wrong angle — looking to cut costs and find efficiencies — and agencies are telling them what they want to hear instead of what’s true.
If an agency claims to use AI end to end, that’s a red flag.
The magic in the middle
BarkleyOKRP calls itself “the big indie where scale meets soul.” With offices across Kansas City, Chicago, New York, Austin and Denver, the agency sits in what Jones calls “the magic in the middle” — between the holding company giants and the boutique shops.
“The divide between those two is becoming bigger and bigger,” he says. “The middle is a different way to go — bringing together media, creative and strategy all together in one place.”
It’s a positioning that only works, he argues, when human creativity and smarts drive the integration. No amount of AI changes that.
Eyes wide open, or get left behind
Jones doesn’t claim to be an AI evangelist. He’s a creative leader who knows the landscape is shifting.
His advice for independent agencies: embrace it, play with it, tinker — but don’t apply it as a blanket solution. Top-of-funnel brand work will remain craft-driven. Lower-funnel performance content will lean heavier on AI optimization. And sometimes the call between traditional production and AI production comes down to each individual script.
“It doesn’t replace our creativity. It enables our creativity,” Jones says. “It should allow us to make creative ideas we would never have been able to make two or three years ago.”
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