originally posted April 2015; tweaked slightly July 2016

On April 8th, the Chinese consumer drone powerhouse DJI Innovations announced a new product. The Phantom 3 is billed as a sequel to the company’s phenomenally popular Phantom 2, and features crisp 4K video capture, a claimed operating range of a mile or more, integration with YouTube Live for direct streaming in 720p, and promised integration with VR headsets. But let’s leave that sort of thing to Gizmodo. Of equal interest is the series of web ads DJI uploaded to accompany its rollout of the Phantom 3. One of these ads is especially intriguing. Let’s watch it together:

Did that seem a bit strange? Consumer tech ads, and ads in general, are primarily aspirational. The promise is that the product on offer will enhance a consumer’s life, allow him or her to inhabit some new self, to make a change for the better — spiritually, economically, or socially. Ideally, the ad will promise a heady mixture of all three, calibrated in various directions that depend on whatever demographic it’s trying to hit the hardest.

That’s the kind of thing any first-year Media Theory student could tell you between bong hits. It’s well-known almost to the point of cliché, and as consumers, we’re more or less accustomed to having new technology presented like this.¹ In many cases, we’re shown the product, and then we are shown how to use it. That’s what gives the DJI ad above — and other ads for nascent consumer technologies, like wearables — such a huge dose of unintentional surrealism: culturally, we have not yet fully determined what the parameters of use will be. The people who make this type of advert have to imagine how the new technology could be used before they can try to sell it to us. Here, it looks like we just have a case of misunderstood user base. The ad probably appeals to at least one wedding photographer, but most of the people buying the Phantom 2 and 3 are anything but professional photographers. And so some angry YouTubers are letting DJI know what’s up.

YouTube user Jesse Rosten even edited the commercial’s sound in order to expose its central lie, which is that drones — even fancy ones like the Phantom 3 — are totally silent:

Weird how the added sound effects make the resolution of all the drone shots seem lower…

The ad is silly indeed, and a soft target. Surely, nobody in the future will be recording their at-the-altar ceremony with a drone? It feels like DJI’s trying to force-feed us a totally ridiculous use case. Look at the way all the decorations on the pews flap around as the drone passes. In reality, it’d be incredibly loud and annoying. And that thing weighs about a kilogram (2.8 pounds). Your finger slips on the throttle and you fly straight into a chandelier. Or the back of somebody’s head.

The whole concept is pretty creepy. DJI wants its product to become part of our most memorable and emotional moments, and we’re like, “Um, we might not actually want that.” Also, let’s not even begin to speculate on why everybody in this advert is supposed to be some indeterminate kind of European. Maybe it’s more romantic.

DJI could have had this filmed on a beach somewhere, and everything would’ve been fine, but the only thing this advert succeeds in advertising is that a drone at a real-life wedding would be, at best, irritating, distracting, and mildly dangerous.

And yet. Weddings are already bizarre, highly-manufactured events, even if you’re going for the kind without all the funky ‘unique’ bits. Nobody’s going to scroll straight past your wedding pictures when the best man is dressed as Admiral Akbar.² From this perspective, a soaring aerial shot of you and your beloved at the altar looks tempting. Why not take advantage; capture the moment in a unique and Likeable way? DJI’s strange advert — and the strange feelings it produces — are evidence not that consumer video drones are unviable or silly, but that the consumer drone revolution is still a few years away.

There’s a strong element of cognitive dissonance involved with new tech, and when it becomes too much to handle, we eradicate it by immediately becoming as blasé as possible. Nobody is blasé about drones yet. People still stare when they see one in the wild. The wave is still rising. When adverts show us a drone doing something that we already saw in real life, last week or yesterday — that’s when the wave will start to break.

In five to ten years’ time, drones for the purpose of video capture will be commonplace at weddings, and in lots of other places too. If you find that hard to believe, imagine yourself transported back fifteen years in time. Your mission is to explain Snapchat and Tinder to a proud new owner of this cellphone, which was released in the year 2000 and sold 126 million units worldwide — making it the most popular phone of that year (it was almost unbreakable and jam-packed with features, including Snake II and three other games, a calculator, and a stopwatch):

It’s not that filming your own wedding with a drone is something inherently gross or bad. Production values matter: for some people, anyway. It’s just that we haven’t yet developed an appropriate level of familiarity (read: culturally enforced jadedness) around consumer drones. Which means that the revolution isn’t here yet — but it’s coming.

Footnotes (sorry):

Another common technique is to simply linger fetishistically on one or two defining aspects of a product, like how thin or sleek it is. Nobody except me, and after that I’ll hide your updates from my feed forever.

July 2016 addendum: the Phantom 4 has been out for a while, with a few new features and a new line of ads: there’s one showcasing the latest model’s ability to lock onto and track a person without any extra human input, demonstrated by a long-distance runner; another one about a Quebecois guy (English subtitles!) who uses it to keep track of the animals in his care (drones will actually be somewhat useful on farms, it looks like, but someone still has to close the gate); and this one about a guy who does extreme slacklining. So it looks like they have their target user group locked down. No more awkward wedding videos; we are firmly in consumer (not even ‘prosumer’) territory now.