Columbia Sportswear Fall 2025
Class Project
Portland State University
Client
Columbia Sportswear
Role
Strategist & Media Planner
Budget
$5 Million
Insight
Young audiences — including outdoor lovers — engage deeply with gaming culture. Gaming is more than a hobby; it’s an identity space, a cultural hub, and a place where young people build community.
Just like the outdoors, gaming is about exploration, adventure, challenge, and storytelling.
This overlap opens a powerful opportunity.
The Background
Columbia Sportswear is one of the world’s largest outdoor brands, but traditional campaigns haven’t been resonating with younger audiences. Gen Z and young millennials consume media differently — they’re digital-first, culture-driven, and heavily influenced by community, creators, and interactive experiences.
Although young outdoor enthusiasts recognize Columbia, they rarely consider the brand when making purchases. Competitors feel more culturally relevant and aligned with youth identity.
Columbia needed a fresh perspective to reshape perception and spark interest among a younger, harder-to-reach audience.
The Challenge
After years of underinvestment in youth engagement, the brand had fallen out of cultural relevance. Younger outdoor consumers were choosing other brands that better matched their values, aesthetics, and digital habits.
The main question:
How do we authentically reconnect Columbia with younger outdoor enthusiasts in a way that feels modern, exciting, and true to who they are?
Our Idea
Blend virtual adventure with real-world exploration.
Our concept was to use gaming as a bridge between Columbia and young audiences, positioning Columbia as a brand that understands the adventures they take — both online and off.
Columbia Sportswear — Media Planning Campaign
For my media planning course, our class worked directly with Columbia Sportswear to solve a real challenge: the brand is well-known, but it’s not resonating with Gen Z. Young outdoor enthusiasts recognize Columbia, but they aren’t choosing it — they’re gravitating toward brands that feel more relevant, more fun, and more connected to the culture they interact with every day.
As my teammate and I dug into the research, one pattern stood out: Gen Z spends a huge amount of time gaming. It’s their entertainment, their community space, and their creative outlet. Even among people who enjoy getting outdoors, gaming is a major part of their daily lives. That overlap became the key to our idea.
We realized that adventure doesn’t just happen outside — for Gen Z, it also happens on screens. So instead of trying to pull young audiences away from gaming, we found a way to merge the two. Our concept reintroduced Columbia through the world of gaming, using creators, challenges, and storytelling that speak the language of this audience.
We built our strategy around “outdoor enthusiast gamers”: young people who enjoy both virtual and real-world exploration. They love challenge-based content, they trust creators more than traditional ads, and they respond to brands that feel fun and culturally aware. This group gave Columbia the perfect entry point into a space where the brand could show up in a fresh, unexpected way.
Our idea was to create the Columbia Excursion, a creator-led adventure series where popular gaming influencers step out of their digital worlds and take on real outdoor challenges using Columbia gear. The entire experience would be filmed, livestreamed, and shared across Twitch, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram — meeting Gen Z exactly where they already spend their time. We paired this with paid media on gaming news sites, gaming platforms, and OOH placements in major cities to keep the campaign visible beyond social.
If this campaign were launched, we would measure success by looking at awareness, engagement, and brand perception. We’d track views, interactions, livestream watch-times, branded search lift, and how effectively the campaign shifts Gen Z’s perception of Columbia from “my parents’ outdoor brand” to something that actually reflects their interests and identity.
Influencer + Creator Partnerships
A huge part of our plan centered on partnering with major gaming creators. These influencers already have the trust of Gen Z and dominate YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, and Instagram. By bringing them together for the Columbia Excursion, we created a shared adventure where they test Columbia gear, take on outdoor challenges, and stream the entire experience. Each creator brings their own personality, humor, and audience — turning the campaign into something the gaming community genuinely wants to watch.
The Columbia® Excursion
This became the heart of the idea. We designed an outdoor challenge series where creators leave their gaming setups and take on real-world adventures. They “overcome climates” using Columbia gear, compete in outdoor challenges, and even game in the wild. The series would livestream on Twitch and later be turned into episodic content on YouTube, giving the campaign both immediacy and long-term visibility.
Social + Gaming Media
To promote the Excursion, we placed content across the platforms Gen Z already uses daily. Influencers would tease and promote the experience on their own channels, creating organic excitement. We’d support this with paid placements on gaming media outlets like IGN and platforms like Twitch and PlayStation/Xbox storefronts — hitting the exact moment when gamers are looking for new content.
Out-of-Home Presence
To extend the campaign beyond digital spaces, we planned OOH placements in major cities — New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Washington D.C., and Portland. Transit ads allow the campaign to show up in unexpected places, and seeing creators they recognize in a Columbia campaign helps reinforce the message that the brand is stepping into their world.