It was our 50th anniversary as a company and the founders (and sole owners) of it had recently, unprecedentedly donated the whole for-profit entity to a trust that would distribute all proceeds (not reinvested in the business) to benefit the fight to save our home planet. Despite the wealth of goodness to take in retrospectively -- decades of risk-taking and innovation and iconic marketing -- we decided to mostly project an optimistic vision for the future, contrary to our potentially "doombat" reputation, and urge people to find joy in doing difficult things - whether that's the work to save our existence, to help create a new model for capitalism or to run 100 miles at a stretch. We who do mountain sports call this "type two fun." We sought and continue to seek to change hearts and minds that people might examine their lives and live, ultimately, more sustainably.

The idea was to cause an emotional response that might move people to reconsider how they look at life itself and thus how they behave in it, to put it maybe a little too bluntly. We would efficiently sum Patagonia's peculiarly human brand and first 50 years and then move to a resolutely optimistic projection of the future to fly in the face of the dire predictions of it. Humans don't move effectively from fear; they move effectively from hope, and the sports and activism we serve as a brand, which are human-powered and generally (both physically and metaphysically) taxing, provide moving metaphors for what we believe needs to happen for the species to continue to exist as we know it.

- Target Audience

This campaign had the broadest audience target of any we've ever made. The idea was to bring new people into our worldview and reinforce our fairly seismic recent evolution in existing fans.

- Approach

Use our extensive archive of film and a script delivered by a chorus of employees to worm into people's hearts and minds that we might spark behavior change and action on behalf of our home planet.

- Implementation

Several months before writing began, the internal production team made a short film to explain Patagonia's new ownership structure to its employees. As part of this production founders and members of the board were interviewed to explain what they had done and why. Lines from these interviews, cribbed or lightly altered, form the backbone of the script. Images from our films, spanning back to 1968, provided visuals and the dialog was fleshed out with particularly moving lines from the same archive.

- Timeline

October 2022-March 2023

- The "hero" film was pre-rolled in its entirety on YouTube. Various cutdowns were distributed on connected TV, out of home placements and all over the internet.

- The full piece and its attendant cutdowns have seen hundreds of millions of impressions.

Honestly we're only in the first couple of months of the campaign, so results are very preliminary. Organic engagement on the full film has been 12 times higher than our normal and the campaign has achieved hundreds of millions of impressions. Behavior change at this point is hard to measure. Consumer awareness and brand perception have never been higher.