Case Study: Patagonia’s 50th Anniversary Digital Campaign

How we helped the storied outdoor brand celebrate an incredible milestone with a multi-stage digital campaign across channels including Social Media, WeTransfer, and DOOH

Patagonia’s 50th anniversary was never going to be a simple “happy birthday” post. Wanting to celebrate an impressive five decades of developing quality gear and spearheading environmental activism, the brand reached out to us – their European digital marketing agency – for support producing and managing a comprehensive traffic and awareness digital advertising campaign.

As well as being capable of reaching many of the customers they’ve touched throughout their lifetime, Patagonia wanted the campaign to act as a valid entry point to their mission, attracting new, environmentally-conscious customers to a brand that arguably has the most pristine environmental credentials in the biz.

Multi-Channel Digital Advertising Strategy

The campaign featured a dual tagline: “What’s Next?” and “Next is”.  Rather than acting as a show reel of past achievements, Patagonia decided to use the anniversary as an opportunity to show they had their eyes trained on the present, on how they were going to battle the environmental and political problems the world was currently facing. Featured across emotive hero video assets and engaging stills, it was a simple but emotive message we knew would work effectively as part of this awareness and brand-building campaign.

With no purchase element to the campaign, we focused on reaching as many of the right people as possible and engaging them in Patagonia’s mission. We suggested kicking things off with a high-impact awareness push that included a WeTransfer takeover, Digital Out of Home (DOOH) placements, and Connected TV (CTV) placements, and then following this up with a traffic phase and staggered video views phase on online advertising.

Advertising on WeTransfer, Connected TV (CTV), and DOOH

In the awareness phase, we allocated budget to dedicated ‘special’ platforms that helped rack up huge amounts of targeted impressions.

For the campaign launch day, we helped Patagonia take over the homepage of WeTransfer in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, putting the hero assets featuring the campaign message directly in front of the file-sharing service’s hundreds of thousands of creative professional users.

We cast the net wider for the CTV aspect of the anniversary celebration, weighting the ad budget between the UK, Italy, France and Germany. Continually testing and learning, we set up Connected TV ads through two platforms, allowing us to see which was the better performer and adjusting the budgets as necessary.

For the final aspect of our ‘special platform’ package, we managed a Digital Out of Home (DOOH) campaign across major European cities. We doubled down on the anniversary messaging, intentionally choosing locations that were already benefiting from existing awareness by having brick-and-mortar Patagonia stores, like Manchester and London.

The Traffic Phase: Driving Engagement through Environmental Activism

The awareness phase was followed by a traffic phase, focusing on our tried and tested traffic-driving placements to push Patagonia’s engaged audience to the website. The messaging for the traffic phase was “Next is: saving our home planet”, highlighting Patagonia’s focus on environmental activism over profit.

The traffic phase was followed by a staggered video views phase, with three pillar videos dropping on a monthly cadence throughout the summer. These focused on iconic Patagonia themes like “Resilience,” “Human Powered,” and “Simplicity”. We advertised on the channels that we knew worked best for video formats, increasing video views and brand recall metrics throughout the summer.

Increasing Brand Awareness

All in all, the Patagonia 50th campaign was a strong example of how upper-funnel activity can both strengthen and broaden a brand’s appeal. The campaign returned a low CPM, a low CPV, and drove loads of traffic to the Patagonia website, gaining over 67 million impressions for the brand. For this special brand positioning campaign, we used a mix of channels to get the right message in front of the right people.

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