What your stance on AI says about your brand
đ° NoGood Insights Vol. 122 | Polaroid says no to AI for the second summer in a row
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Here's a quick TL;DR of what's below:
Polaroidâs second anti-AI campaign draws a hard line
On âtastewashingâ: tech brands borrowing credibility and craft
A24 âs controversial research deal with Google DeepMind
Ready? Let's get into it.Â
đŤ Thereâs no middle ground on AI anymore.
Every brand is now being asked a question it didnât use to have to say out loud: what do you actually think about AI? Audiences have stopped extending patience to brands that hedge. Conviction gets rewarded in either direction, but a middle-of-the-road position reads as evasion, and evasion doesnât stay neutral for long. Someone else writes your opinion for you, itâs rarely flattering, and itâs always out of your hands.
Polaroid picked a side. A24, conversely, tried to hold the middle and got burned for it.
đ¸ Why use Polaroid cameras when you have AI?
Thatâs a question Patricia Varella, Creative Director at Polaroid, answered in their latest campaign, âThe Best of Summer Is Analog.â
The truth is, generative AI tools can create any image in seconds. So instead of relying on product features to sell to Gen Z, Polaroid leaned into the one thing AI will never replicate: the moment itself. They put up a billboard on Coney Island Beach that reads: âGo jump in some water before the data centers drink it all up.â
Their OOH ran across New York, London, and South Korea with lines like âDance like nobody is recording.â Brands canât just show up and claim their product solves a problem or fills a gap anymore. They have to convince people that they play an irreplaceable role in their lives. And when a brand positions itself as a role, the user stops evaluating the product and starts seeing themselves in it.
That self-identification is what builds the relationship and turns into brand loyalty.
At a time where tech companies are âtastewashingâ left and right, the timing of this campaign couldnât have been better. Tastewashing is a phenomenon where tech companies use brand marketing and PR strategies to intentionally associate themselves with art, aesthetics, and the illusion of taste.
But more often than not, the definition of the word taste is blurred and part of the reason is that taste was never meant to be objective in the first place. What reads as tasteful to one person can read as try-hard to another, and that ambiguity gives brands room to work with. If taste canât be measured, it can be claimed, and claiming it is a lot faster than developing it. So instead of building a sensibility over time, plenty of tech companies are shortcutting straight to the performance of one.
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So why are tech companies obsessed with taste?
Taste is inherently profitable. Weâre at a point where AI can help you do almost anything at ten times the speed, so the only thing left is deciding what to do with all that execution power. AI is and will always be a fundamentally tasteless technology by design, not because the tech is flawed, but because itâs built to trend toward the mean: whatâs most popular, most likable, most likely to keep people engaged. You get more volume, but you lose variance.
Thatâs created a divergence between two definitions of taste that have very little to do with each other.
Taste as personal inclination: the slow, friction-dependent development of a sensibility for whatâs niche or genuinely different
Taste as market discernment: the ability to identify what people want and what will sell.
Kira Klaas Klaas, who writes On Brand calls the second one âtaste at workâ; the ability to consistently make decisions that drive positive business outcomes. Practicing taste at work isn't the same thing as having taste, and most tastewashing depends on nobody noticing the difference.
Which brings the story back to Polaroid. A line like âgo jump in some water before the data centers drink it upâ could easily read as the same shortcut: friction and analog aesthetics borrowed for credibility. The difference is that Polaroidâs entire product and mission run on physical, analog hardware. Thereâs no gap between the aesthetic and the substance behind it, and this isnât even the first time theyâve made the case.
đ The role of AI branding in a âtastewashingâ world
Since 2022, over 15 billion AI-generated images have been created using text-to-image tools, and some now mimic camera-style photography so closely that they force a second look. You could type âgenerate an image of a beach in the style of a Polaroid pictureâ and get something that passes at a glance.
Polaroid isnât riding a wave of anti-AI sentiment because the timing is convenient; itâs a brand using the AI conversation to draw a hard line around what it is - the same move tastewashing makes, just pointed in the opposite direction. Both treat AI as raw material for identity. Polaroid just tells the truth about which side itâs on.
Take A24âs research partnership with Google DeepMind. A24 built its entire reputation on human creativity, so the question everyone asked was simple: why take $75 million from Googleâs AI lab?
The backlash wasnât really about the technical terms of the deal. Moreso, it was about what the partnership signaled: Google borrowing A24âs creative credibility to win over an audience it could never reach on its own. A24 clearly understood the risk. Google gets zero access to A24âs content library or data, and Scott Belsky, who leads A24 Labs, has been clear this isnât about making films cheaper or faster.
The âresearch, not productionâ framing exists specifically to keep A24 from looking like it handed artistsâ work over as training data. But none of that mattered once the deal went public. The moment a brand built on human craft becomes the face of the technology that threatens that craft, trust starts to wear thin, regardless of what the fine print says.
For a studio people saw as anti-brand, the collaboration tainted its credibility almost overnight.
People want to choose who they give their engagement to and when. So when Polaroid drops an anti-AI campaign for the second year running, or when a company like A24 announces a partnership with an AI lab, theyâre each making their position legible. Theyâre saying, âI am this,â and audiences get to filter themselves accordingly: stay and support the brand, or walk away.
What Polaroid and A24 prove, from opposite ends, is that the middle ground on AI doesnât exist anymore. Not because brands arenât allowed to explore it, but because audiences no longer grant the benefit of the doubt long enough for nuance to land. A24âs own statements about creative control and research-only framing were true, and it didnât matter. The backlash arrived before anyone had time to read the details.
Tastewashing exists because brands assumed taste could be borrowed. Polaroid and A24 are proof of the opposite lesson: in a market this skeptical, the only credibility that survives contact with an audience is the kind youâve earned, one repeated, undeniable position at a time.
What are your thoughts on the role of AI branding?
Whatâs an industry hot take youâve been too shy to say out loud? đ¤
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