Polaroid billboards champion analog photography with provocative summer campaign

Polaroid unveiled a Coney Island Beach billboard at 8:00 a.m. ET on June 18 with a line aimed straight at AI culture: “Go jump in some water before the data centers drink it all up.” The beachside placement turned the company’s summer push into a public argument for instant film, tactile image-making, and a visual culture that still has room for physical objects.

The billboard kicked off “The Best of Summer Is Analog,” a campaign Polaroid also rolled out in London, with placements at King’s Cross, Bethnal Green, and Hackney. The company framed the work as a rebuke to over-digitalization, and it did not leave the message to billboards alone: Polaroid said it paid 12 creators to go offline as part of the effort, extending the anti-screen pitch into the same social spaces it is criticizing.

The campaign is tied to the launch of the Polaroid Go Generation 3, which Polaroid announced on May 29, 2026. Polaroid calls it the latest generation of the world’s smallest instant analog camera, and says it adds a new lens, stronger flash, five bold new colors, a selfie mirror, self-timer, and double exposure mode. For instant-film shooters, that is the practical side of the story: the brand is not only selling a stance, it is selling a pocketable camera built for quick, physical prints and the kind of imperfections digital systems tend to smooth away.

That positioning leans hard on Polaroid’s own history. The company says it was founded in 1937 by Edwin Land, and that the Polaroid Land camera, launched in 1947, helped define instant photography. In the current campaign, creative director Patricia Varella drew a line between that heritage and the present, saying, “That’s a fight worth fighting.” The timing also gives the jab sharper edges, with environmental and policy concerns around data centers growing as large facilities can consume up to 5 million gallons of water per day, and recent research estimating U.S. data centers used 17 billion gallons directly for cooling in 2023.

Seen that way, the Coney Island billboard was more than a summer stunt. It was Polaroid planting an analog flag in public, using sand, water, and a blunt slogan to argue that photography still has value when it is slow, physical, and held in the hand instead of flattened into another feed.