Campaign Trail is our analysis of some of the best new creative efforts from the marketing world. View past columns in the archives here.
Since its founding in 2006, Yeti has focused on making outdoor recreation products that can survive the intensity of pursuits like hunting and fishing. Driving the company’s production is a philosophy called “bull-simple,” a minimalist approach that removes superfluous elements, retaining only what is essential.
That bull-simple philosophy is also at the heart of a brand platform launched in May in collaboration with Wieden + Kennedy Portland. “Four Letters” reworks the brand’s iconic, block-type logo into passions, pursuits and commitments shared by consumers beyond longtime Yeti loyalists.
“Maybe Yeti wasn’t just for people who love the outdoors: It’s actually for people who are just irrationally committed to something,” said Derek Szynal, an executive creative director at Wieden + Kennedy Portland. “Their product and brand was already resonating with audiences outside of that initial outdoor space, and we just wanted to do everything we could to articulate why.”
The result is a 60-second anthem film that blends found and ambassador-shot footage into a montage of action, all emblazoned with different wordings of the Yeti logo. Set to a metronomic soundtrack, with no voiceover, the narrative is built from pairings of images and words. Footage of a fisherman waiting for a catch, a bull rider tightening his grip and a football team kneeled in prayer are accompanied by “wait.” Images of extreme sports athletes, craftspeople and animals in nature are joined by word pairs like “game” and “time,” “duck” and “dive.” Several shots of a skateboarder missing and then nailing a trick tell a mini-narrative: “fail,” “bail,” “quit” and “nope.”
“I don’t know if we could have actually shot it and had it feel exactly the same. There was just something that felt so true and pure about showcasing people who were doing the thing that they loved, but finding those things in the world as opposed to trying to recreate them,” Szynal said.
Along with the anthem film, the campaign includes three short films featuring brand ambassadors Kimi Werner, David Mangum and Tootsie Tomanetz. Out-of-home creative introduced in May will surround major sporting events, with mobile billboards showing Yeti coolers with logos reworked for each sport. The platform will roll out across retail stores nationwide, with customers receiving a special sticker for a limited time.
A durable brand platform
For Wieden + Kennedy, Yeti presented an interesting challenge. Unlike the clients that need help defining their brands, Yeti already had a sharp point of view and a loyal following.
“People don’t do the thing that they love for the cooler, but the cooler is going to be something that enables someone to do what they love for a longer time, to go harder, to enjoy it more,” Szynal said. “How could we distill down someone’s passion or commitment into four letters that just made a ton of sense to that person, and just be an enabler for that passion, but also get out of the way?”
Wieden + Kennedy art directors Brad Trost and Alex Maleski began the process of reworking Yeti’s logo, but it soon became a wider collaborative effort. Everybody working on the project had an idea of a word or a type of footage that they wanted to see represented — a mutability that has extended to comments consumers have left on social media about the campaign, Szynal explained.
“We still wanted to be able to have a narrative that explained what it feels like to be taken over by a passion, and then the creative challenge was telling that story with only four letter words as simply and concisely as possible, similar to how Yeti would build something for its audience,” he said. “Our job was trying to make sure that it didn’t go off the rails and that there was still a coherent narrative that existed in the anthem that gave the campaign the opportunity to express itself in different ways moving forward.”
In the months since launch, “Four Letters” has already proven to be a durable brand platform. For the Fourth of July, Yeti posted a video to Instagram that used the same style as the anthem, but with “beer,” dogs,” “hang” and “time.” The brand and agency plan to keep looking for opportunities for consumers to see themselves in the creative.
“If you love something, there’s probably a four letter word that perfectly articulates what you're passionate about,” Szynal said. “The next step in this campaign and platform is helping people realize that’s a thing that Yeti can give them, but without giving up their individuality, without giving up personalization.”
