Outdoors brand Yeti 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 you probably shouldn’t get a Yeti for someone you care about: “Don’t get them a Yeti,” says the voice-over, as a ribboned cooler flies out the back of a pickup truck. “Unless you like dogs that are always wet, eyebrows that are still growing back, and sand in places sand should never be.”
By the end of the commercial, it’s clear that the brand is aiming at people who are obsessed. It could be surfing, fishing, camping, golf, whatever—it’s about those chasing the dream wherever it leads them.
But for all its charming predictability, this is more than just another ad for Yeti; it’s a major shift in the way the company approaches marketing and advertising. Thanks to a partnership with Wieden+Kennedy, this commercial is the first piece of advertising Yeti has made with an outside agency, and it signals a new era for a brand that has been staunchly self-made.
For the past 19 years, Yeti has largely created all its own marketing and advertising, including ambitious projects like its ongoing series of short documentaries under the “Yeti Presents” banner. That’s why my ears perked up when Yeti CEO Matt Reintjes announced the W+K partnership on his company’s November 7 earnings call. This came amid outlining how revenue was up 2% year over year but profits were down slightly by 2%, which the company credited to higher tariff costs. International revenue was up 14%.
Mixing strong in-house creative cultures with big-name agencies is rare, especially today, as more brands build out robust in-house teams to replace or reinforce their long-standing relationships with agencies. When the two do mix, one typically emerges as the alpha.
When I spoke to Reintjes recently, he told me that teaming up 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’re incredibly proud of the team that 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 take the power of the in-house creative and content we have at Yeti and pair it with an incredible partner in Wieden+Kennedy and their global scale and global brand storytelling experience capabilities.”
It’s also an opportunity to redefine how a world-class creative marketer can coexist and thrive with a world-class creative shop.
The Great In-house Debate
Over the past 15 years or so, there has been an omnipresent tension in advertising between the role of in-house creative departments and ad agencies. Many in-house agencies were created to save a brand money by not having to outsource all of its creative work. It was also about control, the theory being that an in-house team would know the brand better, and it would be able to 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 bloated holding company bureaucracy. So they started to build out their own teams. The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) publishes an in-house report every five years. Its 2023 report said that 82% of its members had an in-house agency, up from 78% in 2018. Some estimates now put that figure closer to 90%, though the trade group’s next report won’t be published until 2028. Each brand has its own model.
Almost all brand work from Airbnb, Squarespace, and Liquid Death comes from their in-house teams. Patagonia, another heavyweight in outdoorsy film content, produces all of its marketing in-house, too. In the past three years, Kraft Heinz’s in-house agency, the Kitchen, has expanded its work from 4 of the company’s brands to 19, and grown its team from 35 to more than 135 across two offices. PepsiCo has three different in-house agencies—Sips & Bites for bigger projects, D3 for PepsiCo Foods in the U.S., and Creators League, which is focused on beverages. All told, it’s a major investment for these companies.
Ad agencies began to feel threatened. Every project or creative win by an in-house agency could conceivably have been theirs. Trade group In-House Agency Council reported last year that external agencies did 70% of the workload in 2021, but by 2023 that dropped to just 30%. Some execs estimated that 30% to 40% of revenue had bled from the traditional creative agency model through in-housing.
Yet Kraft’s most high-profile (and awarded) work still comes primarily from partner agencies like Rethink. When Pepsi’s in-house agency made the infamous Kendall Jenner ad in 2017, many ad agencies not-so-quietly celebrated the blowback.
What makes Yeti and W+K unique is their chance to reset this narrative and show what two incredibly strong creative entities—in-house and external—can achieve together.
Irrational Commitment
Last year, Yeti released a short film called All That Is Sacred. Directed by Scott Ballew, the 34-minute film is a portrait of Jimmy Buffett and his group of friends in Key West, Florida, back in the late 1960s and ’70s. It shows the balance between the work and leisure life of writers and musicians, including Thomas McGuane, Jim Harrison, Guy de la Valdéne, and Richard Brautigan, and their shared obsession with fishing.
No ad agency on earth would’ve made this. Or let me rephrase: No client would likely buy this idea from an agency. Not because ad agencies lack the creative talent. Ad agencies can, and do, make great, unexpected creative work. Even if we just stick to films, look no further than The Seat on Netflix (Modern Arts for WhatsApp), award-winning short doc The Final Copy of Ilon Specht (McCann for L’Oréal Paris), or waaay back to Pereira O’Dell’s role in Werner Herzog’s 2016 feature doc 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 tie to the brand, typically telling a personal story or chronicling an adventure of one of its many ambassadors. This is none of that. The tie to the brand is less direct, and more about vibes. That can be tough for an agency to push from the outside.
To use a Yeti-appropriate metaphor here, as a piece of brand content goes, it’s not just out in the wilderness—it’s fully off-grid, to a point that would make most marketers feel naked and afraid. But it’s beautiful. And it fits. It fits in a way that only a brand so fully confident in itself and its point of view could.
That point of view has been the backbone of Yeti’s overall brand strength. Pierre Jouffray, Wieden+Kennedy executive creative director, says the agency worked with the internal Yeti team to really crystallize what that point of view is. After talking to all the brand’s ambassadors, one thing stood out. “There’s something that is so true about their product, about the ambassadors, about the people, and about the way we would work together, which is this idea of irrational commitment,” he says. “That’s something that you can really connect with no matter what your pursuit is.”
For Reintjes this isn’t about taking a weird left turn for the brand. “This isn’t about doing something different; it truly is additive,” he says. “It’s almost like a layer cake. We’re just adding another layer on top of the incredible work that our team does from the most grassroots, endemic, connected, authentic audiences across social media and different platforms. We look at this as augmenting and a partnership in and how we scale this brand for a really long time.”
“Bad Idea” is a great start, blending what both companies do incredibly well. It’s even narrated by musician and actor Ryan Bingham (Yellowstone), who hosted a Yeti show called The Midnight Hour in 2020.
The real test will be to build up the global brand work that truly taps into that idea of irrational commitment while still connecting and creating with the audiences who built this brand in the first place. Just Yeti It.