In 2017, The North Face dispatched a team of the world’s finest explorers to the Queen Maud Land territory where they spent a month establishing new routes on the Wolf’s Jaw massif. The six athletes chosen put their pinnacle alpine equipment to the test in one of the most remote places in the world. The North Face, National Geographic, and others published extensive coverage of the trip, including videos, maps, interviews, and photography. The North Face was looking for a creative way to leverage these assets and the Antarctica Expedition story with the goal of broader appeal among non-climbers.

During our initial meeting with The North Face, we knew an underreported aspect of the journey was the story of Savannah Cummins and Anna Pfaff, the team's only two women. And with a respected voice in both nature writing and the gender conversation, our content studio was uniquely qualified to tell it. From there, In Her Element: Two Women Break Boundaries in the Most Isolated Corner of the World was born. In a custom interactive article, we told the story of The North Face’s treacherous Antarctica expedition through the eyes of Cummins and Pfaff.

In the early 1900’s, explorer Ernest Shackleton was recruiting for a voyage to Antarctica. When he received letters from women asking to join the expedition, he responded, “There are no vacancies for the opposite sex on this expedition.” While men have been celebrated for testing their character and exploring this new territory with frequent excursions to Antarctica for the last century, women were banned from the U.S. Antarctic Research Program until 1969.

During The North Face’s Antarctica Expedition, Cummins and Pfaff quickly realized they were the only women on the base, they’d be the only two women on the expedition, and that the female climbing duo they comprised was rare.

Women’s opportunities to join Antarctica expeditions have been restricted, but women have fought to take on roles as base commanders, expedition leaders, scientists, and researchers. In Antarctica, as everywhere else, breaking down gender stereotypes is an ongoing process that was important to highlight in the piece.

When The North Face came to us with this program, our branded content studio at first brainstormed ideas around the environment, but felt like those stories had been told before. When we realized how male-dominated both the climbing world and Antarctica expeditions are, we realized the best story from the expedition was the one about the women’s experience. Cummins and Pfaff didn’t have the same experience as the men on the team and telling the story of this groundbreaking trip in the eyes of two women was revealing, emotional, and significant.

The goal for In Her Element was to reach adults age 18-40, people who consider themselves outdoor actives, and non-climbers. We were able to reach the outdoor actives and non-climbers because the piece has the traditional elements of a high stakes, exciting climbing adventure while also being a story about the difficulties of being a woman in the workplace. By focusing on Cummins and Pfaff’s story, we discussed gender dynamics that are top of mind for so many today. In doing so, it made the story even more accessible for the non-climber audience we were hoping to reach.

Data gathering for the program was all in-house analytics tracking the page performance. We placed The North Face ads on the page itself in the piece. From past programs, we learned that having the ads in the context of the page made people more interested in clicking.

The timeline to create the In Her Element program was brief, only six weeks. The North Face provided previously recorded interviews with all the climbers, their travel logs, and video assets. Leveraging pre-existing assets in a unique way was key to the success of this campaign. The previously recorded interviews didn’t mention how the climb was specifically difficult as women, so our writers did follow up interviews with Cummins and Pfaff to get their side of the story.

The program lived on TheAtlantic.com and was aided by brand media on the website. For further reach, and to tell more of the story, we included clips from our direct conversations with Cummins and Pfaff during The North Face ads in the podcast Radio Atlantic.

The results for In Her Element were excellent, shattering benchmarks for page views and uniques. The program performed 136% above our page view benchmark, 25% of above our average time spent benchmark, and 144% above our social actions benchmark.

The ads on the article far exceeded benchmarks and the newsletter CTR was almost 2x above the benchmark. Throughout the campaign, The North Face had three tweets and a Facebook post from The Atlantic’s editorial handle promoting the feature. People embraced the piece and shared widely, tweeting comments about how they were obsessed with the Maud Land expedition and how inspired they were by Cummins and Pfaff.

In Her Element ends with a short story of a 14-year-old girl who took to climbing because of Cummins. The biggest impact of the piece is if more young women are inspired to climb as a result of Cummins and Pfaff’s powerful story.