Slashy x Kovio: A humanoid robot brand activation in Union Square
How a YC startup put its brand on a walking billboard in the busiest square in San Francisco, and outperformed digital advertising benchmarks by an order of magnitude.
Slashy is a YC backed startup building The Intelligent Inbox. Like every early stage company, their challenge was simple: get noticed in the loudest market in the world, without burning a seed budget on ads people scroll past.
Kovio deployed a Unitree G1 humanoid robot into Union Square, San Francisco, carrying Slashy's creative on its chest screen. Slashy sent one creative file. Kovio handled everything else: deployment, operation, and measurement. No media buying. No guesswork about who saw it. The robot measures its own audience.
Measured by the robot itself.
Every number below was detected live by the Kovio SDK running on the robot, fusing its 3D depth camera and LiDAR. Verified humans in physical proximity, streamed straight to the campaign dashboard, not modeled foot traffic estimates.
Nobody scrolls past a robot.
The average display ad earns a 0.46% click rate, and most of the open web performs far worse, 0.05 to 0.08% for programmatic. Consumers have trained themselves to not see banners. Nobody has trained themselves to ignore a humanoid robot walking through Union Square.
Out of home already wins on attention. Nielsen research puts OOH brand recall at 47% versus 35% for digital media. A robot inherits that recall advantage, then adds three things a billboard will never have: it moves to where the audience is, it counts every real impression with its own sensors, and it gets filmed. Every person who posted the robot extended Slashy’s campaign into feeds Kovio never paid for.
Sixty three people took out their phones to capture the robot, unprompted, and 38 walked up and touched it. That is earned media compounding on top of paid media, and it is unique to this format. A billboard has never gone viral for existing.
- A live activation in premium San Francisco foot traffic
- Sensor verified metrics in a real time dashboard
- Campaign video and social ready footage
- Earned media from passersby posting the robot
Your brand could be next.
Kovio is the advertising exchange for commercial robots, with humanoids live in San Francisco and 1,000+ robots onboarded through partners like Robot.com. One creative file gets your brand on the fleet.
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