While AI-generated images grow harder to tell apart from real ones, Polaroid is betting that consumers still crave pictures that were actually lived, not generated.
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The 89-year-old instant camera brand has launched The Best of Summer Analogue, a billboard campaign across London and New York built entirely on witty, screen-skeptical one-liners. Near Coney Island in Brooklyn, one board reads: “Go jump in some water before the data centres drink it all up” – a sharp jab at the water consumption AI infrastructure demands to keep its servers cool.
Other lines keep the tone playful rather than preachy: “Dance like nobody is recording,” “Less getting tracked, more getting lost,” and “You can’t bask in blue light.” Over in London’s King’s Cross Underground, another board deadpans: “What a glorious day to stare into various screens for hours on end.”
The campaign also introduces the Polaroid Go Generation 3, the brand’s smallest instant camera yet, and builds on last year’s The Camera for an Analogue Life, which placed handwritten-note ads outside Apple Stores and Google offices, needling big tech from its own doorstep.
Brand and creative director Patricia Varella framed the philosophy simply: humans connect through senses, not algorithms, and a Polaroid captures that imperfect humanness – wrinkles and all.
As AI reshapes advertising, content, and consumer products, brands like Polaroid are leaning hard into authenticity and human connection as their point of difference. This campaign doesn’t sell camera specs. It sells a lifestyle choice – one frame at a time.
