Go analog with Polaroid this summer
One: How brands are riding the zeitgeist.
Digital fatigue isn’t a Gen Z kvetch anymore – it’s a cultural movement. Those of us who work in advertising or PR know that success hinges on attention. The always‑on economy is beyond consumer convenience, we’re all in the grip of our technocrat overlords doomscrolling in blue light and bickering with strangers.
Could we have hit saturation point or is it just a summertime romance?
Anyone who’s watched the epic movie ‘The Last of the Mohicans’ knows the feeling. The last generation to grow up knowing real freedom, not being tracked by a smartphone. Digital fatigue is a real thing and it’s growing, especially in the rebellious Gen Z insta hungry crowd. (Although ironically many taken to Tiktok to announce their angst at social media).
Digital fatigue as a marketing opportunity
Polaroids’s recent campaigns The Best of Summer Is Analog is a masterclass in reading the room.
The campaign has been posted in high-traffic areas across London and New York. It combines Polaroids with taglines such as ‘No one on their deathbed ever said: I wish I’d spent more time on my phone’ or ‘Real stories. Not stories & reels’. ‘You can’t bask in blue light.’
My favourite has to be the Ellen Brokovitch inspired, ‘Go jump in some water before the data centres drink it all up.’
To drive forward its message of spending more time in the physical world and creating real-life connections, Polaroid organised a series of phone-free walking tours in Paris and Tokyo. These tours encouraged people to lock away their phones for an hour and to experience the city instead through the instant Flip camera. The London edition will be held on August 19.
It’s striking a chord. The new luxury is time, presence, and real-life moments.
Two: Yes, the return of print
Print is trending. Magazines, newsletters and proper books. Not because they’re retro, but because they’re real. You can’t compare a small hot glaring screen with a beautifully bound hard cover book. The simple pleasure of turning a page, the woody scent and the ability to bookmark favourite pages. Highlight favourite passages.
How can you write a loving dedication on a tablet? Lend it out and receive it back charged with your friend’s energy. Lending libraries are popping up everywhere; railway stations in London have installed shelves of free paperbacks, while TFL last year ushered in a bookswap scheme in the underground.
Books by the Sea in Northumberland encourage beach goers to borrow from outdoor libraries, while YouTubers go book hunting on beaches from the USA to Australia.
Perhaps the most pro-human message of all comes not from a marketing expert but from the poet, Ogden Nash, in the 1930s, who wrote:
I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Indeed, unless the billboards fall
I’ll never see a tree at all.
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