How Native Foreign Used Freepik to Bring Paris Hilton Back to the Car Wash
Twenty years ago, Paris Hilton washing a Bentley with a burger in hand became a pop-culture phenomenon. Built on a simple premise and capped with the iconic “That’s hot” sign-off, the Carl’s Jr. ad was perfectly of its time. Now cut to 2026. Carl’s Jr. has teamed up with creative agency Native Foreign to bring Paris back to the car wash. But rather than delivering a beat-for-beat remake, the team has reimagined the campaign through an AI-driven lens.
In Native Foreign’s reinterpretation, Paris isn’t doing the scrubbing herself. Instead, she’s done what any modern boss would do: building an army of AI Paris bots to handle the suds. It’s a smart way of tapping into cultural memory without falling back on lazy nostalgia, and a glimpse at how quickly creative technology is rewriting the rules of commercial production. The creative team took the beloved source material and injected it with a playful, hyper-stylized energy built for the age of artificial intelligence.
A case study for advertising in the Gen-AI era
Led by Chief Creative Officer Nik Kleverov, Native Foreign used a custom generative pipeline featuring tools from Freepik to rapidly prototype and execute the campaign’s ambitious visuals. They treated AI as core creative infrastructure, and Freepik as their “go-to tool for the team because it gives us access to all the latest and greatest tools and has a super efficient, clean workflow,” says Kleverov.
“We’re able to bring things to life that never would have been possible, because AI expands the palette of what’s visually possible” – Nik Kleverov.
But what makes this campaign a true case study for modern creatives is the hybrid way it was produced. The final spot still required a live-action shoot with Paris to capture her unmistakable real-world presence, blended with thousands of human decisions across casting, wardrobe, and shot development.
That underlying philosophy is what really matters: AI is not just a speed hack. When generative tools can produce a hundred viable options in seconds, the creative bottleneck shifts from generation to selection. The real differentiator is no longer mechanical production skill, but the human judgment needed to navigate a sea of possibilities and shape them into a compelling, culturally resonant narrative.
Ultimately, the Carl’s Jr. remake proves that while AI is changing the mechanics of advertising, it is not replacing the creative soul behind it. If anything, as these tools lower the barrier to executing ambitious ideas, they raise the value of storytelling, taste, and discernment. As Kleverov aptly suggests, ideas have always been the scarce resource. AI may be the powerful new engine driving the future of advertising, but human taste will always be the steering wheel.
