Native Foreign’s Nik Kleverov on why AI is production infrastructure, not a shortcut — and what the Carl’s Jr. and Narcos campaigns taught him about creative judgment.
In February 2024, OpenAI gave a small, selective group of creative professionals early access to Sora, its text-to-video generation tool. The list was short. Nik Kleverov was on it.
That alone tells you something. Kleverov is the Chief Creative Officer and co-founder of Native Foreign, an Emmy-nominated Los Angeles creative agency that has spent the last several years building what it calls AI Labs — a practice dedicated not to experimenting with generative tools, but to embedding them as foundational infrastructure across every stage of production. The agency designed the Narcos title sequence for Netflix. It produced the first brand film ever made using OpenAI’s Sora, for Toys”R”Us. It has won twelve Davey Awards for creative innovation in emerging tech.
When Kleverov talks about AI in advertising, he is not theorizing. He is reporting from work.
And what he is reporting is that most of the industry is asking the wrong question.
The Infrastructure Argument
The dominant conversation about AI in creative agencies centers on efficiency. How much faster can we concept? How much cheaper can we produce? How many rounds of iteration can we compress into a single afternoon? Those are real questions with real answers — but Kleverov argues they miss the point, and that the miss is costly.
“The biggest cost is thinking of AI as a speed hack instead of a creative system,” he says. “When it’s treated like a shortcut, there’s novelty and surface-level savings, but not strategy. When it’s treated as infrastructure, it changes how ideas are developed, prototyped, and executed from day one.”
The distinction is architectural. A shortcut is something you reach for after the idea already exists. Infrastructure is what the idea is built on. The difference between the two isn’t visible in the output of a single campaign — it becomes visible over time, in the compounding gap between agencies that have rebuilt their creative process around AI and those that have not.
For CMOs navigating vendor conversations, Kleverov frames the test simply: “The honest question is: do you have an AI workflow, or are you just tinkering? There’s a big difference between occasionally using generative software and actually rethinking how ideas move from concept to production. The companies that treat it as infrastructure will move faster, think bigger, and leave their competition in the dust.”
The Carl’s Jr. Case Study
The clearest recent illustration of the Native Foreign approach is the Carl’s Jr. campaign featuring Paris Hilton — a piece of work that required Kleverov’s team to make a series of deliberate decisions about where AI entered the process and, just as deliberately, where it did not.
The campaign leaned into Hilton’s early-2000s cultural moment, framing her as a boss overseeing an AI-automated version of the famous Starwash. The conceit was precise: in the age of AI, Paris Hilton uses it to run her operation — while she oversees it. The nostalgia was not incidental. It was structural.
“We didn’t just prompt ‘2000s aesthetic’ and call it a day,” Kleverov says. “We studied the textures, lighting, and slightly over-the-top tone of that era’s advertising and rebuilt it intentionally — but for today’s audience. Nostalgia works when it feels like memory.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmUnjcwsTuQ&feature=youtu.be
That distinction — memory versus algorithm — is where the campaign’s creative judgment lived. AI played a significant role in the production workflow, handling elements that could be generated, iterated, and refined at scale. But the scenes featuring the real, present-day Paris Hilton were kept entirely outside the AI pipeline. The boundary was not arbitrary. It was a considered decision about where human presence creates irreplaceable authenticity and where generative tools could amplify without distorting.
What Narcos Taught Him About AI
Before the AI era, Kleverov’s most celebrated work was the title sequence for Narcos on Netflix — a piece built on traditional motion design mastery, painstaking in its craft, executed without a single generative tool. It remains one of the most recognized title sequences in recent television history.
The skills that made that work possible are, Kleverov argues, more valuable now than they were then — not less. Not because AI hasn’t changed the game, but because AI has changed it in a specific way that makes certain human capabilities more critical rather than redundant.
“Tools can generate infinite options, but knowing what not to use has become the real creative skill,” he says. “The fundamentals of storytelling, pacing, and design judgment still act as the compass. Especially with AI storytelling.”
The infinite options problem is one that anyone who has spent serious time with generative tools will recognize immediately. The bottleneck in AI-assisted creative work is not generation — it is selection. Producing a hundred viable options takes seconds. Knowing which one is worth developing, and why, requires everything that cannot be prompted.
What Creative Directors Must Unlearn
That shift has implications for how creative leadership itself needs to change. Kleverov is direct about what the transition demands from Creative Directors who want to work effectively with AI as a foundational layer.
“Creative Directors have to let go of the idea that the first good idea is the one you execute,” he says. “AI rewards exploration, iteration, and divergence. The job becomes less about protecting a single concept and more about guiding a field of possibilities toward the strongest story.”
This is a significant unlearning. The traditional creative director role was built in part around the conviction and the authority to champion a single idea against the instinct to dilate, hedge, or over-iterate. That conviction remains valuable. But the context has changed. When iteration is cheap and divergence is generative rather than dilutive, the skill set shifts from protection to navigation — from defending the best idea to finding it within a field that AI has made vastly larger.
The Democratization Question — With a Caveat
The argument that AI is democratizing high-end production is one Kleverov partially accepts. More people can now make things that look impressive on the surface. Access to tools that once required significant budgets and specialist teams has broadened meaningfully. That is real.
But it comes with a structural caveat. “The gap between something that looks good and something that’s culturally resonant is still huge,” he says. “If anything, taste matters more than ever.”
This is the counterintuitive consequence of democratization in creative industries: as the floor rises, the ceiling becomes the only differentiator that matters. When every agency can produce visually polished work using the same generative tools, the question is no longer whether you can make something beautiful. It is whether you can make something that means something, and that question has always been answered by the same thing it was answered by before AI existed.
Judgment. Context. A point of view that no model was trained to have.
That is what Native Foreign is selling. And if the Carl’s Jr. campaign, the Toys”R”Us film, and the Narcos sequence are any indication, it is a point of view worth listening to.
