More pixels, more cameras, more storage for photos - the world of photography has never been more readily available at our fingertips. But is that what people want these days? Do they ever even look at those 800 photos from their last beach holiday? We spoke with Polaroid’s Creative Director, Patricia Varella, and Senior Manager of Global Brand Strategy, Docile Banyte, to find out why Polaroid is the perfect antidote to the overly digitized world today, and why their brand ethos speaks so authentically to their audience.

Your new campaign for the new Flip camera – “The Camera for an Analog Life” – speaks to the idea of real vs. digital. Why do you think Polaroid, in particular, can speak to this topic so authentically? And why do you think it’s resonated so much?

Patricia Varella, Creative Director

Patricia Varella: When I started working at Polaroid, our story was about embracing what made Polaroid unique, like the imperfections of the film chemistry and the iconic white frame. It was important to start with something that, as a brand, we had at the core, and then we embarked on a brand journey where we were tapping into different territories.

Dovile Banyte: It's very easy to get carried away in your own story when you work in-house, right? So, with Flip we started dreaming of talking about 80 years of innovation and how cool it is, and all the details from the camera. And of course, we did that with the full funnel campaign. But, at some point, you have to get some fresh air – ‘What's happening in the world?’ ‘What's the human truth?’ ‘What can we do for a new, non-instant audience of people – people who capture images on a smartphone, but find it not so meaningful?’ And that was how we ended up with this amazing out-of-home campaign and this messaging.

Dovile Banyte, Senior Manager of Global Brand Strategy

Patricia Varella: It’s something that’s relevant for people now. The uncertainty, the anxiety that the last 20 years of being on social media brought is clear now. The effect that it’s having in our society – pulling us apart instead of that promise that they had at the beginning of connecting people. Somehow, we are getting trapped in our own algorithms.

Dovile Banyte: Social media failed its promise. Everyone feels more lonely, more burned out, and people lack empathy with each other. So, what’s the beauty of Polaroid? It champions real life. Now more than ever, Polaroid has a really meaningful role to play.

Patricia Varella: We have the authority of a brand that’s rooted in analog, in physicality.

Dovile Banyte: Edwin Land invented the Polaroid camera after his daughter wanted the physical photo right away. This physicality has always been with Polaroid.

Patricia Varella: Polaroid has the authority to say, ‘Analog is something that we shouldn't lose, because it's in real life, in analog life, where we have our best experiences.’ We are analog creatures. We need our five senses to fall in love or trust an individual to close a deal. We use our five senses to get the whole picture of our experience. When you are in a digital world, you are only using your eyes and your ears – and sometimes it's only the eyes. There's a lack of experience that somehow doesn't show the full picture for you to have a human interaction with people.

Dovile Banyte: If you think about digital photography, it’s about pixel perfection. Polaroid is the antidote to that. It's in the product philosophy, in the product itself, in the chemistry.

Patricia Varella: The eight pictures in a Polaroid pack will connect you to life more than the 800 photos in your phone.

There’s definitely a credibility in the connection between the form of the product and the philosophy you’re espousing. Can you talk us through that?

Patricia Varella: I'm going to give you an example that I love from working on one of our campaigns. I had the privilege to meet Jim Goldberg, the documentary photographer, and I asked him, ‘What’s the difference between using Polaroid and another medium?’ And he said that he was using Polaroid as a tool to interact with people and gain their trust. He said, ‘As soon as I show them the picture of themselves, it starts an interaction with that person and opens the door for them to tell their story.’

There's something so basic, so primitive, that we relate to physicality. To acts instead of likes, to smells instead of just a picture on a screen. For Polaroid, it’s not about throwing phones into the bin or not using technology the way that we want to use it. It's about reminding people that the best moments are happening out there when you interact with people in real, physical space.

How do you make that felt, not just understood, in the work you’re making?

Dovile Banyte: Our campaign ‘Capture Real Life’ took inspiration from our chemistry and the warm dream-like aesthetic of our pictures. It championed this duality of things that exist in real life and things that exist in the chemistry in our product. Real life can be imperfect. Real life can be hard, but it’s worth it. And the same with photography.

Patricia Varella: We are trying to get to a real emotion. Something that is unfiltered, something that is not a stereotype. Being vanilla is off-brand.

Dovile Banyte: It’s not just messaging, it’s also about the visual cues you create. We started with ‘Capture Real Life’ using full bleed Polaroid pictures in out-of-home. And they weren’t staged. We commissioned 15 different photographers around the world to shoot the photographs – we gave them a line and asked them to interpret it themselves.

With Flip, we were able to push it further. We took those same visual cues – the full bleed, unstaged Polaroid pictures – but evolved them further with the handwritten lines. And, if you look at the full-funnel campaign, it’s about reminding people that the best of life is found in a real, tactile world. The creative team said, ‘if we make product USP videos, we’re going to do it with a human touch.’ So, it's not CGI. It's actual people deconstructing the actual camera, showing it floating in the air. Even for more commercial banners or on digital, you have an actual person's hand holding a camera.

Who’s the audience for this new work?

Dovile Banyte: As simply as possible: this is not a Polaroid user. This is not a hardcore fan. It's probably not even a person who has an instant camera – ours or our competitors’. It's a completely new person who hasn't yet thought of getting a Polaroid.

There are tonnes of people around the world who take thousands of pictures on their smartphones, and they never or rarely look at them, and they just get lost. It's almost like they're missing a more meaningful way of capturing photographs. We’re not saying that we want to replace an iPhone; it's complimentary. But they have this unsolved need – they want to have an experience that is more authentic, more real.

It's interesting that this campaign saw you evolve into not just standing for something, but also standing against something. How did that come about and how did that shift feel?

Patricia Varella: It’s quite bold and disruptive in a world like today’s to still make an instant camera. Some people see that and think ‘what’s the point?’ But the company we have today is the result of the Impossible Project back in 2008, when a bunch of instant photography lovers decided to buy the last Polaroid factory in Enschede. So that disruptor mindset was already rooted in the company.

And, with the Flip campaign, we also faced a significant challenge: with a lower budget, we had to make our voice heard louder. That gave us the permission to be the voice that inspires people to return to the real life we share as human beings. We were working towards a different strategy because we were challenged by real constraints.

Dovile Banyte: It feels like we're doing something meaningful, and it's an idea that we all buy into here. It's not like we're pushing against technology completely. It's more like we're trying to remind people that the best of life is tactile – raw, unedited and unfiltered. It’s not the perfect pictures that matter, it's the moments and the emotions. We didn't want to sound preachy, we didn't want to sound too serious and say, ‘The internet and technology is bad.’ That was not our intention. Our intention was to reflect a little bit of what's happening: everyone's just craving a less pixel-perfect kind of life.

Patricia Varella: When we presented the concept, we quickly saw the reaction and I knew that it would change absolutely everything – our brand guidelines, the way that we do collaborations, the tone of voice that we had for the brand. It was really interesting to see how people were getting more and more excited. Every stakeholder that we put it to, the reaction was like, ‘Oh yes, let's do it. Are we really going to say that?’ We were going to open the conversation.

Was that approval process all acclaim or were there some doubts you had to overcome as well?

Patricia Varella: There were some doubts. For instance, the word ‘analog’ was something that didn’t translate well to other markets. And also, we want to be a contemporary company, so how should we approach this?

But everybody in the company was seeing themselves in it. There was a truth in this campaign that actually touched people as people, not marketeers or salespeople. It was like, ‘I can relate with that feeling. That message that you are putting out there is something that I think.’ And the excitement ultimately came from the conversations it generated. It was not just love. It was a lot of discussion about: ‘Is this the right moment?’ ‘Is this something that we want to say?’

Dovile Banyte: If it’s starting conversations inside the company, that means we’re doing something right.

Patricia Varella: We saw the potential of this campaign to generate more than just love or appreciation. People said, ‘I love it.’ or ‘I'm not sure.’ or ‘I'm scared.’

What advice would you give other brands or brand leaders to help them make these bold or brave decisions?

Patricia Varella: I think that disruption never comes from above. Middle management has a lot of potential opportunities to change or challenge briefs or communication opportunities. Even small briefs give you the opportunity to set the tone of voice or give you the possibility to establish a new visual language.

Take every single opportunity to try a bit more, and a little bit more. Then, you start getting a bit of confidence and getting a bit more respect, until the moment arrives when you have 100% support to say, ‘This is the way.’

Dovile Banyte: It takes time to talk to people and convince them that brand building takes leading with emotion – that you have to trigger something, otherwise why would people care? It's not a quick fix. It’s not, ‘Let's just be bold.’

Patricia Varella: The reason we ended up doing this campaign was because, two-and-a-half or three years ago, we started building little by little, step by step, towards this specific moment. It was not only mine, this brand vision – the brand is the people that are working in the company. Bringing people along during the last three years was key in order to make this happen. If what you are saying doesn't resonate with them, what’s the point?

Beyond the LinkedIn fervour, how’s this landing?

Patricia Varella: The results from the campaign are going well and the response from new audiences is what we wanted. This seems to be our most successful campaign.

We’re still figuring out the impact of the good results in the awareness phase on sales, but we’re also conscious that we were trying to build the brand, and so it’s important to judge the results of this campaign in the long term. It was important for us to put that message out that ‘Polaroid exists and this is the voice that we have now,’ not just sell the camera. So, now we’ve got some permission to keep on building on this territory. What we're doing now is trying to figure out what that means for the future of Polaroid.

“We are analog creatures”: Polaroid