Outdoor brand Yeti has dropped its new holiday commercial, and it has a lot of what you’d expect from a seasonal spot. “Bad Idea” outlines all the reasons why you probably shouldn’t buy a Yeti for someone you care about: “Don’t give them a Yeti,” the voiceover says, as a cooler with ribbons flies out of the back of a pickup. “Unless you like dogs that are always wet, eyebrows that still grow back, and sand in places where sand should never be.”
By the end of the commercial, it is clear that the brand is targeting people who are obsessed. It could be surfing, fishing, camping, golfing or whatever – it’s about those who follow the dream wherever it takes them.
But for all its charming predictability, this is more than just an ad for Yeti; it’s a major change in the way the company approaches marketing and advertising. Thanks to a partnership with Wieden+Kennedy, this commercial is the first piece Yeti has created with an external agency, and marks a new era for a brand that is completely in-house.
Over the past 19 years, Yeti has largely created its own marketing and advertising, including ambitious projects such as its ongoing series of short documentaries under the banner “Yeti Presents.” That’s why my ears perked up when Yeti CEO Matt Reintjes announced the W+K partnership during his company’s earnings call on November 7. This happened while outlining how sales were up 2% year-on-year, but profits were down slightly by 2%, which the company attributed higher tariff costs. International turnover increased by 14%.
Blending strong internal creative cultures with large agencies is rare, especially today, as more brands build robust internal teams to replace or strengthen their long-standing agency relationships. When the two mingle, one usually emerges as the alpha.
When I spoke with Reintjes recently, he told me that the partnership with the same agency as Nike, Ford, DoorDash and McDonald’s is a reflection of Yeti’s ambition and expansion into mainstream sports, backyards and yoga studios around the world.
“We are incredibly proud of the team we have at Yeti and the way this brand has come to life with their vision and creativity,” he says. “We saw an opportunity to leverage the power of the internal creativity and content we have at Yeti and pair it with an incredible partner in Wieden+Kennedy and their global scale and capabilities for telling global brand stories.”
It’s also an opportunity to redefine how a world-class creative marketer can co-exist and thrive with a world-class creative shop.
The great internal debate
Over the past fifteen years, there has been a pervasive tension in the advertising world between the roles of in-house creative departments and advertising agencies. Many in-house agencies have been created to save a brand money by not having to outsource all the creative work. It was also about control. The theory was that an internal team would know the brand better and could produce work faster to keep up with the pace of culture as social media exploded.
The reality is that brands were also fed up with unnecessary fees and the bloated bureaucracy of holding companies. So they started building their own teams. The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) publishes an internal report every five years. The 2023 report stated that 82% of members had an internal office, up from 78% in 2018. Some estimates Now bring that figure closer to 90%, although the trade group’s next report won’t be released until 2028. Each brand has its own model.
Nearly all of Airbnb, Squarespace, and Liquid Death’s branding work comes from their internal teams. Patagonia, another heavyweight in outdoor film content, also produces all of its marketing in-house. Over the past three years, Kraft Heinz’s in-house agency, The Kitchen, has has expanded his work from 4 of the company’s brands to 19, and the team grew from 35 to over 135, spread across two offices. PepsiCo has three different internal offices:Sips & Bites for larger projectsD3 for PepsiCo Foods in the US, and Creators League, focused on beverages. All in all, it is a major investment for these companies.
Advertising agencies started to feel threatened. Every project or creative win from an internal agency could have been theirs. Trade group In-House Agency Council reported last year that external agencies took on 70% of the workload in 2021, but in 2023 this was only 30%. Some executives estimate that 30% to 40% of revenue from the traditional creative agency model had been lost to internal activities.
Yet Kraft’s most high-profile (and award-winning) work still comes primarily from partner agencies like Rethink. When Pepsi’s own agency created the infamous Kendall Jenner ad in 2017, many ad agencies not-so-quietly celebrated the backlash.
What makes Yeti and W+K unique is their opportunity to reset this narrative and show what two incredibly strong creative entities – internal and external – can achieve together.
Irrational devotion
Last year Yeti released a short film called All That Is Sacred. The 34-minute film, directed by Scott Ballew, is a portrait of Jimmy Buffett and his group of friends in Key West, Florida, in the late 1960s and 1970s. It shows the balance between the work and leisure lives of writers and musicians, including Thomas McGuane, Jim Harrison, Guy de la Valdéne and Richard Brautigan, and their shared obsession with fishing.
No advertising agency in the world would have made this. Or let me put it another way: no client would probably buy this idea from an agency. Not because advertising agencies lack creative talent. Advertising agencies can and do produce great, unexpected creative work. Even if we just stick to films, look no further than The Seat on Netflix (Modern Arts for WhatsApp), the award-winning short documentary The Final Copy of Ilon Specht (McCann for L’Oréal Paris), or back to Pereira O’Dell’s role in Werner Herzog’s 2016 feature documentary Lo and Behold for Netscout.
But All That Is Sacred is ambitious even by Yeti standards. Most of Yeti’s best work has a direct connection to the brand and usually tells a personal story or describes an adventure of one of its many ambassadors. This is none of those things. The bond with the brand is less direct and more about vibes. That can be difficult for an agency to push from the outside.
To use a Yeti-appropriate metaphor, as branded content goes, it’s not just set in the wilderness; it’s completely off-grid, to a point that would make most marketers feel naked and scared. But it’s beautiful. And it fits. It fits in a way that only a brand so confident in itself and its position could.
That stance has been the backbone of Yeti’s overall brand strength. Pierre Jouffray, executive creative director of Wieden+Kennedy, says the agency worked with the internal Yeti team to really drive that point home. After talking to all the brand ambassadors, one thing stood out. “There is something that is so true about their product, about the ambassadors, about the people and about the way we would work together: this idea of irrational devotion,” he says. “That’s something you can really connect with, no matter what your pursuit is.”
For Reintjes, it’s not about a weird left turn for the brand. “This isn’t about doing something different; it’s really an addition,” he says. “It’s almost like a layer cake. We’re just adding another layer on top of the incredible work that our team is doing from the most grassroots, endemic, connected, authentic audiences across social media and different platforms. We look at this as an extension of and a partnership in and how we can scale this brand for a very long time.”
‘Bad Idea’ is a good start, combining what both companies do incredibly well. It’s even told by musician and actor Ryan Bingham (Yellowstone), who hosted a Yeti show called The midnight hour in 2020.
The real test will be building a global brand that actually aligns with that idea of irrational engagement, while still connecting and creating with the audience that built this brand in the first place. Just Yeti It.
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