On a frisbee flying through space.
Would you be willing to even take that risk?
This month, we are plugging the American Red Cross! Even if you can’t give blood, there are many other ways to help out. Visit https://www.redcross.org/ to find out how!
SOURCES
https://simpleflying.com/how-quick-fly-around-world
https://www.columbia.com/expedition-impossible.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/01/columbia-ceo-says-fun-marketing-helping-fue-sales-recovery.html
Gert Boyle, One Tough Mother: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7PSXRZiAak
https://tbwa.com/work/expedition-impossible-columbia-sportswear
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
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Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
A few weeks ago, I mentioned my love for the classic children’s novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and that story, of course, involves a little boy winning a contest and inheriting a fabulous chocolate-making facility care of one Willy Wonka.
But that’s just a fantasy, right? Nobody would ever actually give away a company valued at tens of millions or hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars away to someone incredibly unqualified, would they?
Outerwear company Columbia might, if you can prove to them that you’ve literally been to the ends of the Earth. And I don’t mean the last few places that haven’t been visited by humans – that would be too easy.
No, Columbia is challenging people who believe in the very outdated idea of a flat Earth to prove that they’ve actually found the end of the Earth. If they can do it with real, verifiable evidence, they get the company. All of it. Well, everything owned by it, anyhow. The office equipment and the racks of clothes and the desks and chairs and meeting rooms and everything.
Now, you might describe this as a sucker’s bet. Columbia doesn’t really expect anyone to claim this prize, right? We all know the Earth is round because, well, we learned about Magellan in grade school.
We also can readily understand what a globe is, or see the curvature of the Earth from high altitudes, or acknowledge that the many, many pictures of the Earth taken in space show a planet that’s shaped like a sphere, not a flat disc.
Or, you know, do what Etihad Airlines executive Andrew Fisher did in 2019 and try to fly around the world as quickly as possible on commercial airline routes. His circumnavigation route, by the way – Shanghai to Auckland, Auckland to Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires to Amsterdam, and Amsterdam to Shanghai.
Sort of a reverse Magellan, if you will!
But maybe I’m being way too rational here, because as they closed the contest down last month, Columbia revealed they have received hundreds of submissions featuring, and I’m quoting directly here, “theories, maps, diagrams and attempts from explorers globally to find the Earth’s edge.”
Maybe the folks at Columbia are the real suckers? Or at least gluttons for punishment.
But this campaign is really interesting beyond the media circus antics it suggests.
And in fact, while I was ready to write this off as another example of stunt marketing, I found there was a surprising strategy buried beneath it – and some real lessons for us all to learn!
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
So, let’s back up to the beginning and talk about how this campaign, “Expedition Impossible,” even became a thing.
Because in hindsight, it looks like a really amazingly good idea that Columbia Sportswear followed through with to great success, including winning the 2026 Cannes Lions Grand Prix for Brand Experience & Activation award.
But it actually came from one of the most typical reasons for a brand to launch a provocative ad campaign: sales were down five years ago, the brand was struggling to hit its goals.
They needed to find a way to stand out, to change the conversation, and to give their products, which are typically seasonally marketed or positioned for high adventure, an evergreen quality so they’d be thought about throughout the year.
Now, I thought I’d read somewhere that the idea came from Columbia Sportswear CEO Tim Boyle, but as I’ve gathered up all my sources – they’re in the show notes, as usual – I couldn’t find that particular detail again.
What I will say, though, is that Tim Boyle has been the very effective face of a campaign that was developed in partnership with the creative agency adam&eveDDB, who’d also helped Columbia develop a new tagline, “Engineered for Whatever,” and repositioned the brand, and the outdoors itself, as being rugged, dirty, wild, chaotic and… humorous.
One of the headlines from this new campaign was “This Jacket is a Climate Denier,” showing two men, one of who sort of looks like Santa Claus, sitting out in a blizzard-like snow.
And you can probably see where this is going, because it taps the same strange, interesting energy that the flat Earth campaign grabbed ahold of.
I’ll take a moment Columbia’s brand used to be bold and irreverent back in the 80s and 90s and had sort of turned into a more serious outdoorsy brand over the last 20 years. One of their most famous campaigns involved the founder and CEO, Gert Boyle, putting her son Tim Boyle through crazy tests that could prove how good their gear was.
And I mean really testing this stuff – the commercials would show her using a blow gun to knock him out at the office and then drop him into the snow, bury him under ice, strap him to the top of an offroad vehicle, or force him through a car wash.
The campaign was called “One Tough Mother.”
So the idea of this new campaign was to put Tim Boyle front and center again and to really provoke the world to once again think about Columbia Sportswear.
But how do you do that in an era where everyone’s trying to provoke attention and where cartoon antics are really best left to Wile E. Coyote so you don’t get accused of using AI?
The solution the brand managers and agency came up with was to single out a group of people who tend to court controversy wherever they go: the stubborn-minded folks who identify as flat Earthers.
And they were really smart about how they handled this because in the entire campaign, Columbia never punches down at these folks.
I feel I must take a moment to emphasize that this is not a campaign making fun of flat Earthers, it’s not using them to make a point, and it’s not treating them with disrespect.
Yes, there is a jokey, larger-than-life quality to this whole thing, but if you watch the videos or read the newspaper ad Columbia took out, you’ll notice that they present Tim Boyle as being genuinely fascinated by these folks, eager to give them the chance to prove themselves and happy to sell them the right products to do it.
And that’s smart, because in the modern era, calling people crackpots or looking down on them because they have beliefs that are outside the normal, accepted orthodoxy is a pretty bad look for a brand.
It fuels the fires of small groups of people shouting that they’re being picked on an marginalized, and it also suggests to other people that the brand is being a bully rather than accessible to everyone.
Columbia sidestepped that by rigging up a pretty impossible to win contest – and the fine print, if you look at it, is that the winner gets “The Company, LLC” valued at $100,000, not the actual Columbia Sportswear brand itself, and they further specified this rule;
“The Edge of the Earth” is a visible, physical end to the planet Earth. We’re talking infinite sheer drop, abyssal void, clouds cascading into infinity. What is not “The Edge of the Earth”: A clifftop in Seattle. A cul-de-sac in Kansas. Or your buddy Dave legally changing his name to “The Edge.”
So, in other words, Columbia Sportswear is the final judge of what constitutes proof, which is why those hundreds of submissions were probably never going to be serious in the first place, if indeed they actually existed at all.
But let’s take a quick look at what this campaign achieved for Columba beyond getting them some attention and a big award. Because that’s where this goes beyond stunt marketing and into something more substantial.
First of all, according to a case study published on TBWA, this campaign got 10.4 million views, $2.4 million in earned media value, 80 million in reach and 261 pieces of coverage.
That’s not nothing, especially when some of that coverage came from interviews given to major news outlets like the New York Times and CNBC.
But I think we marketers are often less impressed by those sorts of numbers than the general public, because most of those are just projections. The question is whether this campaign actually achieved an objective and, ideally, caused a bump in sales.
According to Columbia, both of those things happened. Sales immediately started going up, particularly in Europe, according to an interview Tim Boyle gave to Jim Cramer back in May.
And second-quarter sales results released in August were above forecast and shows an increase rather than the previous year’s loss in the same quarter. In the US, where Columbia has been struggling, losses decreased, while in Europe, there’s strong growth.
Given that the second quarter is a weak time for a seasonal business that specializes in outerwear, that’s pretty impressive.
But we do have to be careful here not to attribute sales to advertising, especially since that lift could be due to other factors. I also suspect that the flat Earther concept probably played better in the US than it might have in Europe.
So let’s consider the strategy behind all of this. Did it pay off? The answer is definitely “yes,” in the sense that it helped Columbia get back into the cultural conversation as an outerwear brand that pushes the limits.
In this case, they’re the brand that can now say they were so open to exploring new ideas that they even gave people with incredibly old ideas a chance to change their minds.
But they also were able to get their name out there during a time of year in which people aren’t really thinking about outerwear or winter adventures, nor are they making big purchases for those sorts of products the way they will be in the third and fourth quarter.
So if Columbia can continue to ride the wave they’ve generated, they may be able to keep consumers’ attention long enough to convert their offbeat energy into something that drives people into their own stores or gets them to buy their products through retail channels.
And I’ll conclude by saying that from what I’ve read, this campaign required a significant amount of planning and careful design to nail the execution.
This wasn’t just a snap decision where they acted on an impulse to provoke attention on social media like many brands attempt to do – this was a carefully-designed traditional marketing campaign that had a clear purpose, a story, a timeline and a set of objectives behind it.
And it even used traditional media to help get that point across.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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