Polaroid has figured out the easiest way to win over the internet: Tell everyone to get off the internet.
The camera company’s latest campaign, “The Best of Summer Is Analog,” is built around a series of billboards encouraging people to put down their phones and experience something that cannot be generated, optimized or turned into content.
“You can’t bask in blue light,” one ad reads. Another offers a revised version of familiar advice: “Dance like nobody is recording.”
The sharpest billboard appeared on Coney Island Beach with a slightly more ominous suggestion: “Go jump in some water before the data centers drink it all up.” Other ads sarcastically celebrate “a glorious day to stare into various screens for hours on end.” The campaign is running across New York, London and South Korea as part of the launch of Polaroid’s Go Generation 3 instant camera.
Naturally, screenshots of the campaign immediately spread across the screens it was criticizing. A post featuring the ads became the biggest thread across r/popculturechat this week, earning nearly 29,000 upvotes as commenters celebrated Polaroid for saying what an increasingly exhausted online generation has apparently been thinking.
Yes, this is still an advertisement. Polaroid would very much like people to respond to their digital fatigue by purchasing a camera. But the pitch is landing because it understands something bigger than film photography: People are tired of living as though every meaningful experience must also become digital evidence.
AI has only sharpened the unease. Now the internet is not merely documenting reality. It is manufacturing an endless supply of images, songs, videos and people who never existed. The result is a strange cultural moment in which the imperfect has started to feel more valuable precisely because it proves someone was actually there.
Polaroid’s creative director, Patricia Varella, said the company found its campaign when it stopped asking how to make instant cameras appealing to Gen Z and started asking why Polaroid should exist at all in an AI-dominated culture.
“For Polaroid, the simple act of existing is already an act of rebellion,” Varella said. “While our campaigns are provocative and challenge our relationship with technology, we’re not anti-digital. We know we have to live alongside it, but we’re deeply pro-human.”
