With its fun filters and ability to make life look photogenic and wonderful, Instagram has grown from a simple photo-sharing app into a powerful media platform. Entire careers have been built around it, with “influencers” becoming a new breed of celebrity.

But the idea of hosing influencers with cash and free products to turn them into brand ambassadors is already beginning to feel old. In fact, German bank Sparkasse and its agency Jung Von Matt last year satirized the influencer boom in a campaign for its Kwitt app. Its own influencer was highly unorthodox and, of course, 100% “authentic”.

Influencers themselves were the unwitting targets of “The Black Future Social Club”, a campaign from Italian agency Dude promoting the dystopian sci-fi series Black Mirror. The pop-up club was open only to people who had more than a thousand followers on Instagram. Not only that, but once they were inside they had to collect a maximum number of “likes” for their photos of the night, or risk being kicked out.

The most notorious aspect of Instagram culture is the selfie, the 21st-century version of the good old self-portrait. Whether you find it endearing or annoying, the phenomenon is hard to escape. Here’s what happened when US agency CP-B and t-shirt maker Fruit of the Loom noticed that thousands of men were taking pictures of themselves with their torsos bared.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the platform’s Stories video sharing feature – an idea famously pinched from rival network Snapchat – is proving attractive to brands. A typical feature of Stories is the ability to vote on images and content. This enabled Burger King and LOLA Mullen Lowe in Spain to give users the opportunity to order customized burgers by voting on their favorite ingredients.

Talking of Stories, The New York Public Library and Mother quite rightly asked themselves why there weren’t any actual stories on the platform. To put matters right, they created InstaNovels – classic stories in Instagram form, with beautiful animated introductions.

Agencies are also starting to make creative use of some of the platform’s quirkier tools. For example, animal rights group Bite Back and the agency FamousGrey in Belgium took advantage of Boomerang, which lets users turn short films into endlessly repeating clips. This was used to demonstrate “zoochosis”, which can provoke obsessive-compulsive disorder among zoo animals, such as performing repetitive actions.

Finally, true Instagram addicts sometimes want to take a break from the platform altogether. That’s why Jung Vom Matt/Limmat came up with the “Relax we post” service for Ibis hotels in Switzerland. Hotel guests in Zurich and Geneva could put their Instagram accounts in the hands of experienced influencers, leaving them completely free to enjoy their vacations.