• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, July 28, 2016

Ad agencies love to play around with the internship hiring process. After all, it's really just another excuse to launch yet another self-promotional campaign to share an agency's creative awesomeness. This time around, 360i is offering an internship via an in-house Beam robot. 

According to the agency's LinkedIn job listing, an intern can live wherever they want -- key if you don't live in a big city -- and work at 360i remotely through the Beam robot. The selected intern will be required to beam in 5 hours per week over the course of the 4 week internship.  

The intern will, according to the job listing, "work on real client briefs and special assignments as well as attend meetings and present your work from inside the 4-foot-tall robot." 

Of the robotic internship, 360i Group Creative Director told AdWeek: "The robot internship will give those kids from McCall or Waverly, Tennessee or wherever, an opportunity that is few and far between, to play in the advertising big leagues for a few weeks and get even more excited about the industry we're in. And of course, robots are awesome." 

Self-promotional craziness aside, when you think about it, an internship via robot (teleconference in plain English) is an extremely worthwhile skill for a person entering the workforce to learn. Increasingly more and more work can and is conducted remotely over the internet as opposed to physical offices so this makes perfect sense. 

And let's not forget the issue of office space which, despite the growth of open office floorplans, is still at a premium. Keep the physical body count down and you keep the rent down. Yeah, one intern isn't going to make a difference but every little bit in this direction counts.