Cole Heilborn (00:00)
Welcome to the Relevance Project, where we test what happens when three brands decide to buck the trends of traditional marketing and invest in strong, value-led, consistent organic content over time. If you're curious to see what happens, join us for the next three months. Today I want to tell you a little bit more about the context behind the Relevance Project and why we decided to do this. Over the last few years, I've

as you know, I've been doing this podcast and it's afforded me the opportunity to have insight into how marketers are thinking and how they're making decisions and the challenges that they're struggling with. Later on top of that, with my background as a filmmaker and running a production company, I understand the world of media. I understand how to make content that is interesting, how to tell a story that resonates with

An audience. And for a long time, those two worlds felt like oil and water. It didn't feel like they mixed together very well. But the more I keep talking to marketers, and the more I reflect on my experience as a filmmaker, it's given me a unique perspective, I think, on the world of marketing and the way that content can help marketers today. So, in no particular order, I just want to give you the foundation.

To where where are we at in 2026 and what role does content play in the marketers toolkit? For a little background, the Relevance Project is a public experiment where Portside, my company, is working with three outdoor brands to see what happens when we decide to invest in value-led, audience-first, organic content. I think the real thing that we're testing behind that.

initial kind of you know concept is what does it look like to produce content that has the potential to drive a durable growth engine? I think that's really what we're testing. And as I've been getting into some of these conversations with the brands that we're working with, that that's been some of the goals that they're expressing. So over the next three months, we're going to be doing this work. We're going to be documenting the work, publishing it on the show. And then at the very end of it,

Seeing what comes out of it. Why I think this is important for marketers in the outdoor industry to pay attention to today. I think because of these converging elements is what is leading, you know, people and marketing teams to frankly be confused and to be trying to figure out how do we move forwards in this war, in this attention economy. So, in no particular order, here's what I'm seeing. Number one, we live in an attention economy.

Attention equals value. Now, social media: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, those are platforms that have provided brands with the opportunity for free distribution. The only cost of entry is the creative, is the concept. Now, this is where brands struggle. Historically, brands would put a bunch of money together to go out and create a campaign, and then they'd put a bunch of money behind that piece.

In the media by to actually get the piece of content out there in the world. And so while yes, the creative was important because you wanted it to work and you wanted it to stick and you wanted it to resonate and build that mental availability, it was less important because the brand could rely on putting money behind the media to get it out there in the world. To succeed in the world of organic content, it means you have to have so much sharper of so much sharper creative that resonates with the right audience. Combine that with the fact that

Not only is it hard to produce organic content that works, but most brands are still treating their social media as an afterthought. Social media pages today for many brands, not all of them, but many brands, still feels like it has to be this billboard where anything and everything that the brand does gets published to social media. I've heard this from social media managers at large outdoor brands. Leadership will often say to them, if it doesn't end up on social, then it doesn't feel like it happened. My question though is.

Why does that 30-second commercial spot need to belong on social media? Maybe it does, but more often than not, I'd argue it doesn't. Because today the audience is in control. That's the difference. Brands struggle to fully leverage these platforms despite the potential because it requires having a deep understanding of who they are as a brand, their point of view on the world, who they are as a character.

It means having a really clear understanding of who your audience is and who you're speaking to. And then it requires having the ability to translate those things into content that's actually interesting and relevant and value-led and entertaining or educational for your audience. If you can unlock those things, though, the potential is pretty incredible. The other element that I think is really interesting is that most brands.

Forget that they might be five seconds of someone's day.

I mean, we have spent hundreds of hours on this podcast talking about marketing and thinking about marketing. ⁓ the average consumer doesn't care. They don't think about marketing. They might, they might think about your brand for maybe less than five seconds a day, if that. So marketers need to understand that the audience doesn't care. They don't care about you as a brand. They don't care about your content.

They probably don't care about their your product until maybe they're considering buying. And by the way, that only happens about five percent of the time. The 95% of the other time your customer isn't actually buying. So if the audience doesn't care and they don't actually want you to be a part of their life, because frankly, who wants to be interrupted and be asked to buy something and be forced to watch something that isn't very good? I don't think anyone does. That's another challenge.

How does a brand show up in a way and create meaningful impact in five seconds that's distinct and that reinforces your message with your brand and not your competitors? Well, my answer is what if you led with value? What if you created content that your audience actually chose to engage with? That's the opportunity. But the reality is that your brand might play a role in someone's life for about five seconds. So how are you going to use those five seconds? The outdoor industry has an incredible opportunity. Number one.

Because our industry is based on, you know, it's a lifestyle-based industry. It's based on passion. It's based on hobbies. We have the incredible luxury that our customers are thinking about the industry. They're thinking about their hobbies, their activities when they're doing other things. They're thinking about going on that through hike and planning that five-day camping trip when they're at work. When they're hanging out with their buddies.

After a ride, they're thinking about that next mountain bike trip that they're gonna take. Which means that their attention is already programmed for the world in which we operate, which is incredible. There are so how many other brands and industries would absolutely kill to have that opportunity? No one thinks about insurance. Can you imagine if people actually wanted to think about insurance? How much opportunity would that create for the insurance industry? Yet outdoor brands still

take that audience's attention for granted and produce content and campaigns for them that are just boring, that don't respect their time, that don't build any distinction between them or their competitors. And so I think part of the reason why we see so many bland outdoor films out there is because a brand assumes that the audience will care about their latest ambassador. Newsflash, they probably don't.

If we can embrace that posture of they don't care, but let's figure out a way to help them care or to make them care, that's the posture in which we need to be creating. So the audience's attention is programmed in our favor. That's a huge opportunity. Please don't misuse that. The other element is that I don't understand why the outdoor industry still thinks in terms of biannual campaign spikes. I'm all for great campaigns, but

We live in a world where we have the opportunity to be producing content that is evergreen, that is always on, that is always working. And the brands that think about their marketing efforts in a winter season and a summer season doesn't make a lot of sense to me. And it's not just because of the opportunity that these distribution platforms have created for us, it's also because your buyer is only buying 5% of the time.

94 95% of the time, they're not buying. So as a brand, why would it make sense to only be pushing your brand during you know three months out of the year? It makes more sense to be building assets that are compounding over time and to be thinking about the campaign cycle as an annual approach. The other element that I that I I think we need to be paying more attention to is.

A reflection of ourselves, which is how does it feel to be be to be bombarded with advertising every single day? You know, there's that stat out there that the average person engages with 7,000 or 10,000 pieces of advertising every single day. Absolutely absurd, right? Everyone hates spam emails, everyone hates LinkedIn spam. Everyone hates those pop-up ads, everyone hates banner ads, everyone hates YouTube ads. Yet why do we keep producing?

Interrupting ads that provide no value. It's not that every ad is bad. It's that most of the advertising doesn't actually respect the audience. Most advertising is saying, let me interrupt your time. Let me show you an ad that you don't actually want to watch. And then let me ask you to buy something. That's like the equivalent of having a door to door salesman show up at your door.

knock on your door, wake up your kids who are sleeping, and say, Hey, can I interest you in some lawn care? Why are we still treating advertising this way? We have the opportunity to respect the audience's attention, their interests, help them feel seen and heard, and produce advertising or content or whatever you want to call it in a way that is actually respectful to them. The other thing that I think is really interesting right now is that

Paid media is an incredible tool. It has built some very large businesses. What I don't understand though is why would you build a business built almost exclusively on renting attention when you could be building attention? Now I know attention is fickle, but the paid media machine is at a vicious cycle. You have to spend money to make money. Once you stop spending money, you stop making money.

What if there's a different way? What if you could create content that was always working for you? Again, that's the potential. And it's not that I'm like against paid, like it has a place. but but some of the numbers that I've seen from this industry, marketing teams are spending 80 to 90% of their media of their budget on on media. Meanwhile, customer acquisition costs are increasing and they're actually losing efficiency. They have to spend more.

To get similar results. If the goal is to build a sustainable business, what is sustainable about a model like that? Now, again, I'm not anti-paid, but you have to build the foundation, build the compounding set, build the compounding base, and then use paid to, you know, go after a particular niche or to grow the business during a particular season. But a brand that's just built on paid is missing so much potential for a stronger business.

Not to mention that investing in value-led, audience-first, organic content has the opportunity to turn into highly efficient paid media. Instead of using paid media as your way to test your creative, use your organic media to do so and then double down and put money behind the stuff that's actually working. How Brands Grow, part two, ⁓ by Jenny and Byron. It's a really fascinating book.

And it's really opened my eyes to how brands grow, hence the name of the title of the book. And there's really two primary drivers that the book talks about, which is physical availability and mental availability. Physical availability is can I get this product? Is it easy to get? Does it come in my size, the pricing of it, etc.? Mental availability is when I am ready to buy. Am I gonna think about

Which brand am I going to think about? When I'm ready to buy, which brand am I going to think about? That is mental availability. Now, there's elements to mental availability that make it more powerful, such as how many associations does your brand have with those category entry points in which your buyer, your customer might be buying. But it also talks about distinction. It doesn't matter how many points of mental availability my brand has with my customer, if there's no distinction between my brand.

And my competitor. And so this book talks about the importance of distinguishing your assets. And that's across that's everything from logo to color palette to tone to taglines to music jingles, but it also applies to the world of content. And if we think about how brands are showing up with content today, many of them are making a very critical mistake, which leads to the sea of sameness that we all see. It's not distinct.

There's very little differentiation between brand A and brand B in terms of the content that they're producing. Right? Do the old logo test, pull up an Instagram page from brand A and look at brand B and remove the logo. Can you truly tell the difference? Most people can't. Now, this sea of sameness argument might feel like it's just something that a creative person such as myself would lament over. Like a moral high ground. But

Distinction is key. So my question is, how can we be using organic content that's value-led to reinforce those memory structures and to build more mental availability with your ideal customer? How can we be using organic media to reinforce those category entry points with a customer? That's the opportunity. Layer on to all of that. Brands are often short-sighted, leadership is often risk adverse, teams are stretched thin, budgets are stretched thin.

There's a lack of creativity and brainstorming that I think happens on the regular because people are stretched thin. And then there's this question of that all might be true, but where do we go from here? How do we start? Well, that's what I want to try to prove with this relevance project. Is given this landscape that every outdoor brand finds themselves in, how do we move forwards? Can we build a durable growth engine and use content as

The foundation for that. Can we increase the efficiency of our paid media all while respecting our audience and giving them value? That's the premise and that's the opportunity that I see for brands in the outdoor industry today. But it requires a different type of thinking. It requires thinking about your audience and thinking about what would give them value, then investing in that value for them and not being afraid to do so.

If you wanna follow along with the Relevance Project, I'd encourage you to hit subscribe on YouTube, to hit follow on Spotify or Apple or wherever you're finding your podcast today. Because over the next three months, we're going to be working with three brands to wade through 2026 and try to figure out how do we help brands show up with content in a meaningful, impactful way. Thank you for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed it, please consider sharing it with a friend.

or leaving us a review on Apple. And remember, as you're working on that next piece of creative, the difference between creative that works and doesn't work often comes down to the hard questions that you ask while you're shaping.