Pro-Human Position

Polaroid put up a beach billboard telling people to jump in the water before the data centers drink it. Our creative director spotted what it really was within the hour.

When Polaroid's summer campaign started circulating, Jake Lawall, creative director at a small studio, flagged it to the team almost immediately. His read was that this was something genuinely different for the moment we are living through, and what impressed him most was the delivery.

The campaign is a provocation, but a tasteful one. It says the uncomfortable thing beautifully and lets you think on it.

Polaroid's out-of-home campaign, The Best of Summer Is Analog, produced with Brainlabs, ran boards in New York, London, and on the boardwalk at Coney Island. The Coney Island placement tells beachgoers to

"Go jump in some water before the data centers drink it all up."

Another board points out that blue light makes a poor substitute for sunshine. This is not nostalgia marketing, which too many are obsessed with. There is no sepia filter, or wistful copy about simpler times. It picks a fight, names an enemy, and does it with a big smile.

Positioning by opposition has a distinguished family tree. Apple's 1984 spot defined the Macintosh against a gray conformist machine before most viewers had ever touched a computer. Avis built decades of growth on the confession of being number two. Patagonia told people not to buy its jacket and sold more jackets.

Naming an enemy is one of the oldest moves in branding because it does something a benefits list cannot:

it tells the audience who you are by showing them what you refuse.

What is new in 2026 is the enemy on offer. Fatigue with screens, feeds, and synthetic everything has gone from fringe complaint to mainstream consumer mood. The nostalgia data flooding out of retail this summer, retro promotions outperforming discounts, analog objects growing across categories, is the same current Polaroid is surfing. Plenty of brands have noticed. Polaroid is simply the first to convert the mood into explicit messaging.

And it can afford to, which brings us to the tension at the heart of this piece. Human-delight is easy to claim and brutally hard to earn. Polaroid gets away with provocative copy because the product itself is the receipt. The chemistry in an instant photo does not have a server farm behind it. Any software company trying to run a similar messaging would be roasted, and several will surely try, because oppositional positioning is most tempting exactly when a category feels commoditized.

We want to propose a name for the failure mode before it arrives:

human-washing.

Just as greenwashing taught consumers to audit sustainability claims, human-washing will teach them to audit authenticity claims, and those audits will be fast, public, and merciless. So before any brand reaches for this position, we suggest a three-part credibility test.

Does the product itself embody the refusal?

Does the business model survive it?

And would you hold the position if the trend reversed tomorrow?

Polaroid passes all three. Most brands eyeing this territory pass none, and the gap between the two is the gap between water and oil.

One clarification, because our readers deserve honesty over sanctimony. We experiment with AI daily. We suspect that, so does most of the team that made this campaign.

The lesson here is not that machines are bad.

The lesson is that what you say no to is a design decision, arguably the most revealing one a brand makes, because refusal costs something.

Polaroid paid for its position over eighty years of making one stubborn, chemical, unrepeatable thing.

That is why the billboard connects. You cannot prompt your way to it.

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