Case Study: Patagonia’s Backcountry Touring Campaign

How we helped Patagonia raise product awareness and sell-through for their AW23 backcountry touring collection

Over the last several years of our partnership with Patagonia Europe, Backcountry Touring has been a keystone campaign for the autumn/winter season. We saw tremendous success with our promotion of this category in 2021 and 2022, so the bar was set when Patagonia approached us to develop and implement the paid media strategy for Backcountry Touring 2023.  

A Multi-Channel and Multi-Phase Ad Campaign

Our objectives for this campaign were to generate awareness around this product category, target new prospects within the snow sport world, engage and educate our existing audience, and drive conversions of Patagonia’s Backcountry Touring collection. As with the GORE-TEX campaign, we set out to achieve these objectives via a product-focused 3-phase funnel, utilising 6 digital advertising channels: Connected TV, Snapchat, Pinterest, Youtube, Google Display, and Google DemandGen.

Thought-Provoking Campaign Concept

The concept of the campaign was around the idea of what’s useless vs. what’s essential – while the pursuit of fresh powder might be deemed “useless”, the moments comprising that pursuit are “essential” to its enjoyment:

“The 5 am, ‘smells-like-ski-boot’ car rides. The overstuffed, delightfully overheated backcountry huts. The post-tour high-fives. The slippery skintracks and smashed, half-frozen sandwiches.”

The sentiment of the assets at the top of the funnel successfully played to the insider’s mentality of giving all your time to a sport that others might regard as pointless. The assets at the middle and bottom of the funnel carried this message through, but with a more overt product focus to drive traffic and conversions.

A/B Testing Sport Interests & Engagement

Throughout the funnel and across channels we carried out A/B testing of assets geared toward skiers vs. assets geared toward snowboarders to gauge comparative engagement of these two groups. We were happy to find that both sets of assets saw high engagement and conversion rates, showing that this product category resonates well with both sport audiences. 

Transitioning from Discovery to DemandGen

One unavoidable challenge during the course of this campaign was Google’s sunsetting of its Discovery placement – historically a key player in our traffic campaigns – in favour of the new DemandGen placement while we were halfway through the traffic phase. Fortunately, through careful performance monitoring and responsive campaign management, we were able to pivot to the new Google placement midway through the campaign with minimal impact on performance. 

Adapting to a Cookieless World

As the landscape of digital advertising changes and the world moves on from third-party data, we are continually evaluating and evolving our targeting strategy. We took the opportunity with this campaign to test some new first-party segments within our email remarketing audiences, and we were pleased with the results, particularly in the conversion phase of the campaign. 

Linking It Back To Activism

We appended a fourth funnel phase to this campaign whose objective was to drive traffic to the Patagonia Action Works site, to a landing page dedicated to climate change awareness, education, and action. We saw success with similar activations in our 2022 Backcountry Touring campaign as well as our Autumn 2023 Surf campaign in which we used the momentum of the product campaigns to encourage our engaged audience to join Patagonia’s activism community. This year’s activism phase drove a substantial amount of traffic to the Action Works site, and as we also support the Action Works platform for Patagonia, we were able to see that there was a substantial uptick in engagement through environmental actions taken on the site in January and February when the activism phase was live.

Delivering Results Year After Year

The challenge with this campaign was to meet the results achieved by last year’s Backcountry Touring campaign, which was no small task considering this year’s campaign was preceded by the GORE-TEX and Holiday campaigns, two mammoth campaigns in their own right. We carefully planned our campaign phase dates and targeting strategy to keep these three campaigns from negatively impacting each other’s performance. 

Fortunately, we surpassed our attributed revenue targets for Backcountry Touring, as well as surpassing last year’s conversion ROAS, and far exceeded our standard ROAS benchmark. Both we and the Patagonia team were very pleased with the results.

How we drove sales for GORE-TEX and Patagonia

Read about Patagonia’s “Facing Extinction” Campaign

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