Selfies Are Just Photos

See, here’s what’s so annoying about this:

This is a drone. It does what drones do. It flies around for nine minutes, hovers in the air, etc. @Moose tested it. He said it actually was one of the easiest to fly, and might be the most stable of the ones he’s tried for our site. They could’ve marketed it for that: its ease and stability.

Or maybe they could’ve called it a photo drone or a video drone, because it does have a camera that can take 1.3MP pictures and 720p videos. After all, drones are often used for photos or videos. My pretty basic wedding package featured a video done with a drone. Remember that shot at the end of 10 Things I Hate About You, of the band playing on the top of building while the credits rolled? That shot probably required licensed pilots, a helicopter, crew members, waivers, the works. Now, anyone could make something that looks like that, for, I’d estimate, 5 figures less thanks to drones. Like this one.

And no: a Remake-The-Last-Shot-Of-10-Things-I-Hate-About-You-Or-Something-Like-It Drone isn’t exactly going to move units here in 2018… but it would probably be better than Selfie Drone.

Like, are you fucking serious? The phrase “selfie drone” is verbal ipecac. It takes ingenuity and renders it into an overcomplicated way for millennials to engage in the act that has become synonymous with the self-absorption most other generations (wrongly) know them for.

Still, what annoys me isn’t the how clear it is that this product was definitely named by some old dude thinking he’d discovered a new way to “reach the youth.” It had to be, by the way, because, say what you will about millennials, they at least know what a selfie is, and a photo that you need a drone’s angle to capture is not a selfie; it’s a photo with you in it. There’s a difference.

What annoys me is how reductive it is. It’s a dumb marketing 101. It thinks it’s carved out some entirely new lane in the drone game by catering to the selfie-obsessed among us, without taking into account the large number of people that it would turn off. Like, there are probably folks who arrived at the site today, read the product name, and said, “oh, no way,” and navigated away without reading another word. Or even if they did get further, they might still be thinking, It could be cool… but cool enough to risk my friends seeing a box that says “Selfie Drone” on it in the week before the recycling gets picked up? I don’t know…

That’s what really annoys me. But it doesn’t annoy me that much, to be honest. I mean, there’s a reason we can sell this thing here for $20. And it’s not because it’s a bad drone.