Cole Heilborn (00:00)
It's been one week since we announced the launch of our outdoor organic content experiment, and the results have been pretty incredible to watch. Not only have people been applying, we've got about 15 brands at this point who are interested and are going through the application process, but it's brought up a lot of really interesting conversations that I've been having offline with folks about some of the challenges that the industry faces. Now, I don't think these challenges are limited to outdoor by any means.

But there are challenges nevertheless across the marketing landscape. But again, I think what's unique about the outdoor industry is that the reason this whole hypothesis has potential. And again, the hypothesis is: can we use organic content to drive a similar level of awareness and reach, ⁓ but specifically relevance with the audience?

And hopefully cut some of the costs of paid media that are required that a lot of brands have to spend in order to get themselves out there. The reason why, again, this hypothesis has potential is because you have to think about the outdoor audience and where they focus their attention. Now, because this is a passion-based industry, and because the people and the customers that we serve are recreationists and they want to spend their free time pursuing these hobbies, that

Automatically means that their attention is tuned into the outdoors. When they're at work, they're thinking about the outdoors. When they're going to the gym, they're thinking about that next hike that they're going to go on and the prep that they're doing to get ready for that. And so because their attention is already programmed, that means brands have an opportunity to show up in their world and capture some of that attention. Now

I would argue that the outdoor industry has abused this attention. ⁓ we've taken it for granted, and we've assumed that the customer inherently cares what we have to say as a brand because their their attention is programmed into the outdoors. Now, a lot of industries, they don't have this luxury. There are so many industries, a lot of commodity industries where who who no one's thinking about toothpaste until they're picking up their toothbrush to brush at night.

But we have an opportunity. We have an opportunity to lead with content that is steeped in value and entertainment. And that's the whole reason why this experiment I think has potential. ⁓ I was chatting with a VP of marketing last week, and we were talking about this concept: like, could you refine a brand's point of view?

To a sticky enough spot, to a sharp enough spot, where then if you could translate that to organic content that's relevant and entertaining, how much of an impact would that have on the business? Now, this is a business that spends a lot of money on paid ads to continue to drive their customer acquisition. The problem is their revenue and their acquisition costs are rising equally, and they're not creating any efficiency in their in in the acquisition.

You know, I don't know all the answers to these questions, but that's one of the reasons why I want to run this experiment. And so this is the first episode of a future of episodes. So this is the first episode of me documenting the process. Right now, brands are applying to join this experiment. If you're interested in joining this experiment or being considered, ⁓ you have until the twenty-sixth to submit your application and schedule an intro call with us to chat further.

From there, we'll evaluate our options and then make our selections moving forwards. We anticipate this being a three-month experiment. And over that time, we're going to work to really dive into benchmark the brand and where they sit today so that we can see if we have any sort of meaningful impact on them as we do work together. We're going to go through and do a bunch of brand discovery, audience and customer discovery, ⁓ point of view work.

Translating that into content strategy, competitive analysis to make sure that what we're making and what we're suggesting we make isn't already being done by their competitors. And then helping and support and facilitate the production of the assets, distribution, and then ongoing strategy and analysis and refinement as we get this content out in the world and start to learn from real signals. For those of you that are interested in following along with this experiment.

We're still trying to figure out how we're going to document it, to be honest. We're not sure if it's entirely podcast focused or if it's a mix of the podcast and YouTube content. we're still trying to figure that out. But if you have any ideas for how you'd like to follow along, we'd love to hear from you because we're still trying to shape this and we'd love for you guys to suggest input if you have any. As we've been prepping for this experiment, I've been doing some analysis myself as I've been engaging with different outdoor brands and their content on Instagram and YouTube.

And a question I've been asking myself is how many brands are making me laugh? And the answer is zero. I I haven't come across any content from a brand that's, you know, a traditional outdoor brand that makes me laugh, that makes me feel anything. And maybe I'm just really jaded and and and maybe I have some.

Personal stuff I gotta work through. But I think that's a signal for how brands are treating their content these days. And that's the huge opportunity that I see. And it's not that humor and laughter is the anecdote for every single brand, right? That's that's obviously that only works for some brands. But I think we have to be asking ourselves are we making our audience feel anything? And if not, not only are we doing a disservice to them.

But we're also missing massive opportunity when it comes to the outcomes and the and the the business implications that creating emotionally led video content and photo content can produce. So that's one of the things I'm really curious to experiment with in this, you know, in this experiment myself selfishly, is what happens if we bring laughter to the world? What happens if we bring laughter to the Instagram feed? How does that impact the business?

And at face value, that might just sound like something that's nice to have, right? ⁓ bringing laughter to the business world, you know, what sort of impact does that have on things? Well, I would argue a lot because we live in the attention economy. Where people put their attention is where they put their money. And if five percent of customers are only buying at one time, that means you have to be talking to the 95%.

At any given point in order to even be considered and remembered and relevant when they are buyers. So how do you do that? Well, you create content that's relevant. So as you can tell, I have a lot of theories. We're gonna take this one week at a time. We're gonna test this stuff live. We're gonna document it and we're gonna share it with you. And we're gonna share the good stuff and the bad stuff and and the questions that we don't have the answers to. This is very much an experiment that we hope to learn from also. And we're not afraid to share what doesn't work.

Because I think we all have a lot to learn. So again, stick with us over the next three months as we embark on this journey. We'll be announcing the brands that we select shortly. But again, if you're interested, apply by the 26th. We'd love to sit down and have an intro call with you and see if this could be a good fit for you.

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