In France, 86% of children between the age of 12 and 17 have a smartphone. Most of them have their Bluetooth constantly activated. In recent years, a concerning phenomenon has emerged: The AirDropping of dick pics in public spaces; also known as cyber flashing.

Kids are in danger and adults usually have no idea it’s happening. We needed to find a solution to stop this problem. Our objective was to sensitize people to the potential dangers of AirDrop technology, and to convince them to secure the AirDrop settings of their children.

We AirDropped thousands of “dick pics” to people all over France, to show them how easy it is to receive and accept unsolicited photos. In reality, our “dick pic” was a picture of a mooring bollard. Because in French, this is also colloquially called a “dick”.

The dick pics that we airdropped to people included two pieces of information: how they had received this unsolicited image, and how they could stop it happening: by changing their AirDrop settings from “everyone” (the default setting) to “contacts only”.

AirDrop is a proximity-based media. In order to spread the message to as many people as possible, we called upon mobile developers to hack iPhones, turning them into automatic distributers of our message. We then put these phones in the hands of volunteers and sent them all over France. In subways, bars, restaurants, malls, and to sporting matches, cultural events, and because it’s France… some demonstrations and protests. To warn future iPhone owners, we also hacked iPhones at some Apple stores.

Using only 30 iPhones, over a period of 2 weeks, we were able to AirDrop our message to the iPhones of over 250,000 strangers.

- 250 K people affected by using only

30 Phones, over a period of 2 weeks

- 28 M media impressions in 48 hrs

without investment

- 7 M organic impressions in 48 hrs

without investment