Here’s an interesting time-waster — and it’s not even for a brand!
This campaign exists to allow Boston-based a&g Labs, the “innovation unit” of allen & gerritsen, to flex its muscles. And flex they did.
If you’re on Instagram, you know there are plenty of “those” people in your feed — the ones who post constant selfies, snap every meal they eat, or document each time their cat rolls over. But short of unfollowing the guilty parties, there hasn’t been a way to subtly hint that they’re overdoing it.
Until now.
a&g Labs created Pic Nix, a program that allows people to anonymously call out offending Instagrammers using a robot.
The site explains the process thusly:
Instagram does not allow 3rd party applications to publish photos to the app using their API, so in order for Pic Nix to exist, a workaround had to be created. Essentially, the only way to post a picture to Instagram is through Instagram. We considered hiring interns to do this. But after a long night of watching sci-fi movies, a solution presented itself in a dream: robots. A single robot, to be exact. We call him SILENT B.O.B., and B.O.B. allows us to publish the photos in real time, 24/7, without us torturing interns. Basically, we created our own custom Instagram post API powered by robotic input.
Ingenious.
Users can visit www.PicNix.co to start secretly alerting their friends that the selfies (or one of 15 other clichéd Instagram offenses) have got to stop. Once a person visits the site, selects an offender, chooses one of the 16 offenses, a real robot then interacts with a real iPhone to compose and sends the message to the offender. Check out the video below, which explains how Pic Nix works — and then use it to call out your friends!
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