Polaroid’s business died twice, but the brand never did. Now, in the age of AI, the very thing that made it obsolete has become the most valuable thing it owns.
Last year, Polaroid put up billboards in New York and London. Each one was a real instant photograph with a single handwritten line across it: AI can’t generate sand between your toes.
The locations were chosen on purpose. Polaroid put them close to Apple Stores and Google offices, so analogue photos and handwritten copy sat right outside the buildings where most of the world’s digital life gets made.
I think it’s one of the smartest pieces of brand positioning in years.
By any reasonable measure, the camera Polaroid sells shouldn’t exist anymore. The phone in your pocket takes sharper photos, stores thousands of them, and edits, shares and backs them up for free. A Polaroid gives you one shot. You can’t retake it, edit it or filter it, and you have to wait while it slowly develops in your hand. Even its own creative director has admitted it’s almost ridiculous to launch a point-and-shoot camera today.
They launched one anyway, and instead of apologising for everything the camera can’t do, they built the whole campaign around it.
That decision only makes sense once you know how close this brand came to disappearing, and what the rest of the marketing industry has quietly admitted this year about the cost of optimising everything.
The year Edwin Land founded Polaroid. A decade later he released the first instant camera, after his three-year-old daughter asked why she couldn’t see the photo he’d just taken of her.
The number of times Polaroid went bankrupt. The first was in 2001, with around US$950 million in debt. The second was in 2008, when film production stopped entirely.
The share of brands that are effectively undifferentiated, according to Havas research across 87,500 people and more than 2,400 brands. Brands with genuine audience attachment were 240% more likely to grow.
In 2008, two believers bought the world’s last Polaroid film factory in the Netherlands. The machines were broken and the original chemical formulas were lost. Nine years later, they bought back the Polaroid name.
The business had every reason to die, and it did. The meaning attached to the name didn’t. That’s what brand equity really is, and almost no brand ever has it tested this brutally.
For most of the 20th century, Polaroid was one of the most innovative companies on earth. It’s often called the Apple of its era. By the late seventies it made the best-selling camera in America and employed more than 21,000 people.
Then digital photography arrived and the business collapsed. By 2001 the workforce had shrunk to under 8,000 and Polaroid filed for bankruptcy. It was sold, and then its new owners fell apart in a major fraud case. In 2008 Polaroid went bankrupt a second time and announced it would stop making instant film altogether.
That should have been the end. The market no longer needed the product, the company had no money and the factories were closing.
A small group of people refused to accept it. In 2008, Florian Kaps and André Bosman bought the last Polaroid film factory in the world, in Enschede in the Netherlands. The machines were broken, the chemical formulas had been lost and the suppliers had gone out of business. They called their company The Impossible Project, after something Land once said: don’t undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.
It took them two years just to get the film working again. In 2017 they acquired the Polaroid brand itself, and by 2020 the company was simply called Polaroid again.
Think about what that means. Strangers bought a broken factory with no working recipe for the product, purely because they believed the name was worth saving. The business was worth almost nothing, but the meaning behind it was worth risking everything for. You won’t find a clearer demonstration of brand equity.
Your product can become obsolete, your format can die and your technology can be overtaken. If the meaning attached to your name is strong enough, though, it can outlive all of that and find a new way to exist. A Polaroid is no longer the best way to take a picture, but Polaroid still means something no phone ever has.
When Polaroid set out to launch its Flip camera in 2025, the problem was obvious. How do you sell a camera with no editing, no retakes and no screen, when everyone already carries something far more capable?
Most brands in that position would compete on the very terms they’re losing on. They’d add features, talk up a sharper lens and hunt for a technical angle to close the gap. Polaroid’s creative director, Patricia Varella, said the answer was the opposite: celebrate what technology can’t do.
So the campaign, called The Camera for an Analog Life and made entirely in-house, leaned into every limitation. It used handwritten notes over real, imperfect Polaroid photos, with lines like Real stories, not stories and reels, No one on their deathbed ever said, I wish I’d spent more time on my phone, and Remember the night we spent on our phones? Me neither. The one that travelled furthest was AI can’t generate sand between your toes.
Most brands either fix their weaknesses or hide them. Polaroid took the exact thing that made it obsolete and turned it into the reason to buy. You can’t retake the photo, so it matters more. You can’t edit it or generate it, so you know it really happened. The limitation isn’t a flaw in the product. It’s what the product is.
The placements did just as much work. By putting billboards outside Apple Stores and Google offices, Polaroid made its argument about the digital world right on the digital world’s doorstep, so the location became part of the message.
The campaign went properly viral. Varella has said she came back from a digital detox holiday to find hundreds of messages about it on her phone, which is a lovely bit of irony. This year they doubled down with a billboard planted in the sand at Coney Island: Go jump in some water before the data centres drink it all up.
Varella is also clear that Polaroid isn’t anti-AI. She frames the campaign as an argument for balance, not a rejection of technology, and that’s the smarter position. Polaroid isn’t picking a fight it can’t win. It’s offering the one thing the other side can’t
At the ANA Masters of Marketing conference in October, Havas Play’s Ben Harms said something that would have been unthinkable a few years ago: we have over-optimised everything. He argued that performance marketing has drained the emotional appeal out of brands, and that what marketers need now is conviction, not more data.
The numbers back him up. Havas research across 87,500 people and more than 2,400 brands found that 84% of brands are effectively undifferentiated, while brands with genuine audience attachment were 240% more likely to grow.
The picture is clear. After a decade of everyone optimising toward the same metrics with the same tools and tactics, the output all looks the same. AI is that same process running at full speed. When anything can be generated instantly, generated work starts to blur together, and nobody remembers sameness.
So the brands paying attention have started treating real as a position, not just a principle, and Polaroid is far from alone.
Aerie, the loungewear brand, pledged in October 2025 never to use AI-generated bodies or people in its marketing, and the announcement became its most popular Instagram post ever. In March, it ran a campaign in which Pamela Anderson prompts an AI to generate a model, before it cuts to a real shoot and her line: you can’t prompt this. Chief marketing officer Stacey McCormick summed up the strategy: in an industry where everything can be generated, real becomes rare and unique, and that makes it powerful and different.
Dove got there first. In April 2024 it became the first beauty brand to formally pledge never to use AI to create or distort images of women in its advertising, backed by a study of 33,000 people across 20 countries.
Cadbury shot its 2025 Dairy Milk film with real chocolate on set and no CGI or AI, and said the choice was about using experts in their craft. Apple TV’s Pluribus added a line to its end credits saying the show was made by humans. iHeartMedia launched a guaranteed human campaign after finding that 90% of its listeners wanted media made by real people.
Read Aerie’s line again: real becomes rare, and rare becomes powerful. That isn’t an ethical statement, it’s positioning. These brands aren’t taking a moral stand against technology. They’ve noticed that the one thing nobody can generate is now the scarcest thing in the market.
There is a catch. Every brand that has made this work had already earned the right to say it. Polaroid has 89 years of being about real moments, Aerie stopped retouching its models in 2014, and Dove’s Real Beauty is twenty years old. A brand that announces a no-AI pledge this quarter, with no history of valuing human craft, isn’t holding a position. It’s borrowing one.
If every brand eventually stamps made by humans on everything, the claim will stop meaning anything and we’ll be right back where we started. The brands that keep the advantage will be the ones whose whole history already proves it.
Your brand can outlive your product.
Polaroid’s format became obsolete and the business went bankrupt twice, yet the brand survived because its meaning was stronger than the thing it sold. Invest in what your brand means, not just what it makes right now. Products get overtaken, but meaning that’s built properly can find a new way to exist.
Your limitation might be your differentiation.
Before you spend money closing the gap on a competitor, ask whether the gap is the point. Whatever makes you slower, smaller, more manual or more expensive might be exactly what a certain customer wants. Polaroid didn’t fix its weaknesses. It made them the reason to buy.
The real risk is sameness, not technology.
84% of brands were undifferentiated long before AI showed up. If you use the same tools, chase the same metrics and produce the same output as everyone else in your category, you’re adding to that number. Use AI wherever it saves time behind the scenes, but protect the parts your customer actually sees and feels.
You can only claim what you can prove.
Every brand winning with real spent years earning it first. If you want to stand for craft, humanity or authenticity, the proof has to come before the claim. A pledge with no history behind it is just a marketing line, and audiences can tell.
Conviction is the scarce input now.
Nobody A/B tested their way to AI can’t generate sand between your toes. It came from a team with a clear belief about what their brand stood for and the nerve to say it outside Apple’s front door. When every business has the same data and the same tools, the advantage goes to whoever is willing to hold a position.
This edition leaves you with a slightly uncomfortable question. If someone stripped every AI-generated, templated or optimised thing out of your brand tomorrow, what would be left? Whatever remains is your real brand, and if the answer is “not much”, it’s time to start building.
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