About

As the company grew, so did the questions. We knew how to make things, but we wanted to better understand why some work mattered and some disappeared. So we started The Backcountry Marketing Podcast and began interviewing marketers, strategists, creatives, founders, researchers, and agency leaders across the outdoor industry.

More than 240 conversations later, the answer has become much bigger than production.

We learned that the audience doesn’t care just because a brand has something to say. And when brands forget that, the consequences are expensive: campaigns get ignored, organic channels become streams of promotional noise, and companies increasingly have to pay to force mediocre work in front of people.

We learned that brands often know who they are in theory, but struggle to translate that strategy into the real world. The result is familiar: the same photography, the same language, the same campaign structures, and content that could have come from almost anyone. Brand strategy sits in a deck while the people making ads, social content, YouTube videos, and campaigns are left to interpret it for themselves.

And we learned that modern advertising has to provide value if it expects to earn attention. Without something meaningful on the other side of the exchange, brands are simply asking people to stop what they’re doing and pay attention to marketing they never asked for.

That feels particularly wasteful in the outdoor industry, where the audience already cares deeply about the world our brands participate in. People organize their lives around outside. The opportunity is to create marketing worthy of it.

Today, Port Side is a creative agency helping outdoor brands translate who they are into distinctive creative identities, content, campaigns, that give people a reason to care.

- Cole Heilborn
Creative Director