Columbia Sportswear was looking for a way to encourage people to go outside that broke out of the traditional messaging seen in the category. So they created a campaign starring CEO Tim Boyle, who called on Flat Earthers to prove that the Earth is flat in exchange for ownership of the company.
The campaign supports the brand’s new “Engineered for Whatever” platform, the brand’s guide for the next decade. The insight was “how far can we push whatever?,” explained Matt Sutton, senior vice president, head of marketing at Columbia Sportswear. “Maybe to the edge of the Earth and that includes Flat Earthers. According to what is said about the edge of the Earth, it’s a pretty cold place and you need our gear to get there. We just thought it would be hilarious but in a respectful way.”
The brand created a video with Boyle and took out a print ad with a letter from Boyle in The New York Times with the call-to-action: “You guys claim there’s an end to the Earth. Snap a picture, send it to us, and you get the assets of the company.”
The campaign got people talking. It resulted in emails, handwritten letters, in-bound calls to customer service and social media conversations. “When I say handwritten letters, I mean five pages of manuscript with geometry and math, handwritten diagrams and stuff,” said Sutton. “We’ve had video submissions, podcasts. It really hit a nerve.”
Created in collaboration with adam&eve TBWA in London – where the Flat Earth Society happens to be headquartered – the campaign is an example of the brand’s return to its maverick roots. Founded by the Boyle family in 1938, the company has a history of edgy ads. Gert Boyle, Tim’s mother, has been featured in ads in which she says: she’d moved to Florida, but the weather sucks there or my mother refuses to sell a single parka to skiers.
Last year, Columbia’s president Joe Boyle sent a brief to ad agencies saying they had a business opportunity to bring back the company’s challenger spirit. “We had fallen into this sea of sameness,” said Sutton. “Columbia is a technical product innovator. We are arguably the highest value in the market. But at the end of the day, if people don’t know the story and aren’t energized by it, even our breakthrough innovation and products kind of fall by the wayside. And so his challenge in sending this letter out to the top agencies in the world, which adam&eve answered was, ‘How do we get back to that edge that made us a famous global brand?’”
Columbia’s leadership pushed the agency and the internal marketing team to stand out in an extremely homogenous market. The company did an exercise with six competitor images on a whiteboard and post-it note over the logos. “It could have been from the exact same brand – beautiful serene vistas, serious models, climbing up a hill and beautiful sunny conditions,” explained Sutton. “We did it differently intentionally.”
The Flat Earther campaign garnered more than one billion earned media impressions, with 20 million views on one asset alone and 20,000 shares, new levels of earned media for the brand. The company has also seen double digital site traffic increases and a revenue increase in the same quarter that the campaign launched. They also won a Titanium Award at Cannes Lions for the work – notable for the company’s first time at Cannes.
“What we heard from the judges is that this idea took a huge degree of courage and trust,” said Sutton. “Courage to do something wacky like this, but to the creativity component, trusting in the idea and not messing with it. In my role as the client and thinking about risk averse things, there is an inherent tension of trying to think about business objectives and watering down creative ideas. With full support from Tim and Joe, we trusted the agency’s idea in this and we did not water it down and we didn’t flatten the idea. And that took a tremendous amount of trust.”
