How BarkleyOKRP used AI to build a ’90s mirror-world for Slice

If you happened to be driving on U.S.-101 in early summer 2025 and scanned the radio dial for some L.A. flavor, you might’ve happened onto 106.3FM “The Fizz” and fallen – Bill and Ted style – into an earlier, more excellent decade. A time marked by flying V guitars, hair scrunchies, and “cool beans.”

It wasn’t your imagination: Just an AI-powered time machine built for Slice.

Visit TheFizzFM.com to listen to the full broadcast.

Slice exudes strong ’80s and ’90s energy. As new owner Suja Life relaunched the brand in the healthy seltzer category, they wanted to capture nostalgia for that time but faced a challenge in taking on giants like Poppi and Olipop with a fraction of their budgets. So it tasked creative agency BarkleyOKRP with outkicking its media budget by hacking traditional advertising spaces.

To meet the challenge, the agency used Gemini in concert with Imagen, Veo, and other Google AI creative tools to build a throwback radio station that would captivate Gen X and millennial audiences who lived through the ’90s, as well as younger zillennials who wished they had. Over a five-week sprint, BarkleyOKRP used Google AI to produce more than 40 original songs, two synthetic DJ personalities, band histories, original album art, video clips, and three hours of AI-generated programming, all saturated with Slice references.

“Instead of doing a classic billboard launch, we wondered, how can we put something on the other end of a billboard that nobody would expect?” said Andrea Knowles, VP creative director at BarkleyOKRP.

This is the story of how a creative team used AI to build a fully imagined world.

When AI explodes the brief

The team’s starting point was a series of prompts with Gemini, which provided a useful window into ’90s radio culture for a team that was largely too young to remember it. The query, “What was programming like on a real ’90s-era radio station?” returned a bulleted list with program guides, scripts, station IDs, and more.

With these research outputs in hand, the team decided to go much bigger than they’d originally planned. They signed a one-month lease of available radio spectrum and got to work generating song lyrics, DJ talk-tracks, station IDs, album art, band histories, and whizbang sound effects that would air on both offline radio and a website, all with the help of Google AI.

The resulting campaign captured the sound and visual feel of the ’90s in a way that was previously impossible.

Here’s how it came together:

• The songs. BarkleyOKRP used Gemini to come up with song lyrics, titles, band names, and band histories for 40 songs that would air on “The Fizz” in a format dubbed “Pop 40,” a send-up of Casey Kasem’s iconic “American Top 40” countdown. With feedback, Gemini became adept at writing lyrics. While its first attempts resembled ad jingles, the outputs quickly evolved to more convincing anthems and love songs that echoed hits from the time in genres ranging from hip-hop to hair metal.

“Imagine having to write 40 songs in three weeks — good songs people want to listen to. That’s very difficult to do,” said David “Sully” Sullivan, partner at creative consultancy Simkins Lightbulb Company, which assisted BarkleyOKRP. “We found Gemini got really good at creating meaningful songs and meaningful lyrics.”

Even with AI speeding things along, making this much music on such a compressed schedule involved relentless deadlines as the agency scrambled to leave enough time for client reviews. And they batched out songs 10 at a time to two musicologists to ensure they were on solid legal ground.

BarkleyOKRP used Google Gemini, Imagen, and Veo to create AI pop stars and music for its “106.3 FM The Fizz” campaign.

• The DJs. The Pop 40 was hosted by an AI-generated character, DJ Bev, who offered light banter between songs. Another AI-created figure, Dr. Poplov, hosted a separate “Slice Advice” call-in show. In developing these personalities for radio, the agency aimed for a self-aware, jokey tone. The goal was to create a plausible version of ’90s radio that didn’t take itself too seriously.

“Growing up in Philly, I used to listen to Y100, and you come to love the DJ personalities,” said Andrew DiPeri, SVP of creative at BarkleyOKRP. “I said okay, how can we recreate that, but make it super fun and a little bit tongue-in-cheek?”

The AI-generated DJ Bev hosts the ’90s-inspired radio station, created by BarkleyOKRP for Slice.

• The art. The visual identity for “The Fizz” required creating 40 unique album covers that felt authentically ’90s. For the BarkleyOKRP team, this was a major opportunity to demonstrate to the industry that AI can accelerate the creative execution of big ideas.

“Prior to this work, our AI image generation was always behind the scenes,” said Knowles. “It was an extremely uncomfortable moment and a big marker for all of us.”

This discomfort drove an obsessive attention to detail. Each album cover went through up to 20 versions, with text prompts averaging 50 to 100 words. All of this work was necessary to ensure authenticity, diversity, and brand integration, proving the importance of human oversight in AI-first creative development.

• Native content, merch, and more. The Slice campaign didn’t end with The Fizz. BarkleyOKRP also created a retro website, held giveaways for unique and vintage merch, and launched a YouTube “Chill Zone” that drafted off of the lo-fi beats trend. One of BarkleyOKRP’s writers, also a DJ, contributed expertise on the origin of YouTube’s lo-fi beats trend.

Unlocking massive scale

Given the unprecedented scale of the work, the team felt there was no better moment to debut a campaign composed of AI-generated art. A big reason was the scope of output enabled by Google’s interlinked AI creative tools, relative to the available budget. The resources needed to create 40 bands, cast talent in those roles, set up period-authentic photo shoots, and manage post-production would have been time- and cost-prohibitive.

“The amount of work that we were able to pump out would never have been possible without the help of these tools,” said Sullivan.

Source: BarkleyOKRP, June 2025.

Another draw was the opportunity to learn how to wield these technologies effectively. For example, BarkleyOKRP discovered they could ask Gemini to help generate detailed prompts optimized specifically for Imagen. This produced excellent visual results while saving time.

By uncovering these AI multiplier effects, the agency was putting itself in good stead for future client projects.

And then there were the results: 119 million-plus PR and paid media impressions, 45,700 online streams, a formidable 33% view rate accompanied by a 60% more efficient CPM, and 180,000 analog radio listeners. All on an impossible timeline with a shoestring budget.

But perhaps the biggest motivation to go all-in was the prospect of being pioneers and raising the bar for AI-powered creative work. Knowles said she and her team were deeply aware that AI novelty isn’t enough. The work needs to be genuinely entertaining.

“Creatives that use AI from here on out will continue to set the standard. The bar keeps going up and the finish line keeps moving,” she said. “So make it good and hold yourself to that standard.”