How A Robot Queuing At The Apple Store Grabbed Global Media Attention

Last week an employee from Sydney creative media and research agency Atomic 212 queued up in front of the Apple store on George Street waiting for the latest iPhone 6S. the only difference was she wasn’t physically standing in line, a robot called Lucy saved her spot. The CEO of Atomic 212 Jason Dooris chatted with B&T about how this robot came to be and why Atomic 212 didn’t need to spend money promoting the campaign.

Lucy the Robot is a ‘telepresence robot, which means she is essentially a screen on wheels, complete with microphone, camera and video screen. Lucy is created by Double Robotics from Sunnyvale, California.

“The robot is a combination of the technology, the hardware and Lucy the human, together that is the personality of the robot. It’s a humanoid; half droid, half human fused together,” Dooris told B&T.

Lucy The Robot

According to Dooris, at 7am last Friday the story of Lucy the Robot had been translated into over 26 separate languages across the globe. Dooris believes Lucy has been so damn popular because the campaign tapped into something much bigger then the robot itself.

“With social media campaign you very often focus on your idea or product and who you are trying to reach in the market. But they very often ignore ‘currency’ or ‘topicality’, if you ignore what’s going on in the world then you’re not really connecting with the things that are most important and relevant to your everyday person at that specific moment in time.

“This campaign really tapped into what was going on at Apple and the release of the iPhone 6S, it just had that secret ingredient.”

Here’s an exclusive video from Dooris of Lucy the Robot leaving the Apple store with her latest purchase:

“You’ve got a phenomenal amount of energy around Apple and their iPhone, and Australia represents the first iPhone sold anywhere in the world,” Dooris said. “The energy starts outside the doors of the Apple store in Sydney, so if your campaign starts right there in the queue there is an incredible amount of energy and you can positively leverage that energy.

“From a pure media spend we decided not to invest in any traditional media or any digital media. The idea being that from a traditional perspective it would be picked up by national and global television, radio and newspapers. And from a digital side, it was a nice piece of content so we wouldn’t have to support it through that either.”

“Apple have really embraced it, they’ve been amazing throughout the process. It’s been amazing, it’s really energised the whole agency, and everyone is getting behind it. It’s superb.”

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Advertising Standards Bureau Luke Starr Simon Jarosz Troll