Skip Slop & Slap
AI makes content.
It doesn't make connections.
Skip Slop & Slap is a half-day workshop that reconnects your comms team with the creative work only they can do, and gives them a clear-eyed way to decide where AI should be, and where it shouldn't.
THE PROBLEM
More content, less connection
Your team is under pressure to use AI. Fair enough: it's here, it's amazing, and it's not going away.But using AI for content doesn't push you towards better: it pulls you to the average. The safe, competent, middle-of-the-road content everyone else is getting from the same prompt. That's slop. And slop has two big problems:It doesn't connect. Comms exists to make people understand something, care about it, act on it. Slop can't do that. It's fluent and completely forgettable, filling the channel without ever reaching the person on the other end.It's no fun to make. The prompting and tidying and churning out of competent drafts nobody's proud of quietly strips the craft (and the fun) out of the job. Make slop all day and you stop feeling like you're any good at this. Not because you aren't, but because you're not being let loose on the part where you're brilliant.That's the real cost. Not that you'll sound like everyone else, but that you'll work harder, enjoy it less, and connect with no one.
"It was the first time I've felt engaged with AI. It made me realise how it can be handy, but still not quite replace what we do."
THE IDEA
The answer isn't less AI, or more AI.
It's deliberate AI.
Some jobs are perfect for a machine. Some are the entire reason you got into the communications profession to begin with.Most teams have never been given a clear way to tell the two apart, so they either offload everything and lose their edge, or freeze up and miss the genuine wins.Skip Slop & Slap gives your team that clarity. We reconnect them with their own creative firepower, then hand them a simple, practical way to decide task by task what's a job for AI, what's a job for a human, and what's better with both.
"I've thrown off the shackles of my own cautious-nicity, and two days later I'm embracing it with all I have."
What happens in the workshop
It's not a lecture forty slides about large language models. Skip Slop & Slap is an engaging, interactive few hours that your team will still be talking about on Monday.
They rediscover what they can do.
Fast, fun creative exercises that remind everyone how many weird and wonderful ideas a room of real humans can come up with on the spot.
They learn where AI actually belongs.
The lightbulb moment: mapping your team's real comms work into human, AI, or a mix of both. It's not just the what, but also the why.
They leave with things to use the next day.
Sharper prompts, a smarter division of labour, and a shared language so the whole team is deciding the same way, not one person at a time.
What your team walks away with:
A team that trusts its own creativity again. A practical framework for when to reach for AI and when to keep your hands on the wheel. Concrete skills they'll use the same week. And (this is the part that surprises people) a whole lot of optimism about the age of AI.
"A useful high-level framework for assessing why and where we could use AI. We haven't received anything like that from our own org."
your workshop leaders
Seamus Boyer
Seamus spent ten years as a journalist deciding what deserved attention, then took that instinct into government communications. He's led newsrooms, advised councils and agencies, and built New Zealand's largest public-sector social media database, so he knows what actually earns attention, and what just adds to the noise.
Hayden Maskell
Hayden is a copywriter and brand-voice consultant who helps organisations sound like themselves: Cloudy Bay, Whittaker's Chocolate, Meridian Energy and Powershop among them. He hosts Brave New Word, a podcast about language, creativity, and what AI is doing to both.
"It's very, very rare that any workshop holds my attention the whole time. You two managed it."
Who it's for:
Skip Slop & Slap is designed for communications and marketing teams, especially in the public sector, being told to "just use AI" without the time, budget, or guidance to do it well. Each workshop is delivered in-house and built around your team's actual work, not generic examples.
book a workshop
Keen to bring it to your team?
Tell us a bit about your team and what you're wrestling with, and we'll take it from there. Skip Slop & Slap is a half-day workshop that runs in-house, built around the work you actually do.We're Wellington-based and work right across Aotearoa.
We'll be in touch soon.
© Seamus Boyer and Hayden Maskell. All rights reserved.
Keen to learn more about creativity and AI?
Come think it through with us. Our Substack is where comms people work this AI stuff out together: the fears, the wins, the what-on-earth-do-we-do-now. No hype, no slop.