About this article:
In The Creative Gamble, a marketing leader shares a creative risk that either flopped or succeeded beyond expectations — the raw, honest story behind a bold decision, and what they would do differently if they had the chance.
The number one question I get asked when I tell people I used to lead social media at The North Face is: “Did you do that helicopter video?”
Yes, yes I did. I’ve told this story about a dozen times now on podcasts, in award submissions, and in interviews on behalf of the brand for Ad Age.
Today, I’ll tell you the full story, including the roadblocks we faced, the doubts we had, the creative gambles we took, and why I encourage marketing professionals to trust their gut.
It was a Friday afternoon in November 2023. We were finishing up for the week when my teammate Katie Boudreau sent me a video link on Slack.
Jenn Jensen was hiking in New Zealand in the pouring rain, wearing a North Face jacket. It wasn’t keeping her dry, so she posted a video, soaked and annoyed, joking that she didn’t want us to just mail her a new one when she got home. She wanted us to show up on the trail with a jacket. She opened with “I’ve got a bone to pick with The North Face” and ended with “Listen, I don’t want a refund…I want you to express deliver a new jacket up to the top of Hooker Valley Lake in New Zealand where I will be waiting.”
The crazy part was that Jenn had never posted a single other video to TikTok. She had a small following of friends and family and thought maybe they’d see it and laugh. Instead, it started going viral, climbing to millions of views before the day was even over.
People started to weigh in with hot takes, commentary, and jacket recommendations. One comment—“Northface watching this like 👁️👄👁️”—got 40K likes. And truly, that is exactly how we felt.
We knew we needed to act quickly to make an impact. We started brainstorming, throwing out as many off-the-cuff ideas as we could. And we kept coming back to her demand: Why don’t we just actually show up with a jacket?
The first few times I said it out loud, I didn’t even take it seriously. It was more in the spirit of the “no bad ideas” rule. We were using it as a jumping-off point for other, more reasonable ideas.
I wish I had some elaborate brainstorming tactic to share, but there wasn’t a brilliant creative insight behind it. It was the most obvious idea in the world: listening to the customer.
I called our CMO at the time, Sophie Bambuck, and said, “Hey, this is happening. Can I send a helicopter with a jacket?” I remember laughing because it sounded insane out loud. She literally said, “Go have fun.”
That’s it. That was the whole approval process. I think about that a lot, because that kind of trust doesn’t show up out of nowhere on a random Friday. It gets built over months and years of showing your work and knowing your channel. Without that trust, the jacket would have simply been mailed to Jenn’s house a week later, and nobody would have ever heard about it again.
That was the alternative I kept coming back to: taking no action, or only limited action. If we didn’t do something big, one of our competitors could swoop in and turn this into their marketing moment. It was ours to lose. Multiple brands had already engaged with the video, including Columbia Sportswear, whose comment, “we got you bestie,” received over 89K likes.
Next, we had to pitch the idea to Jenn. Our priority was never making content for our channels. It was making things right for the customer. We wanted to show up in a big way for her, whether or not the last-minute content plan fell into place.
We slid into Jenn’s DMs, told her we were sending a new jacket, and asked if she was up for doing something fun. We got on a call from the other side of the planet to gauge her interest in being part of a little content piece with us. She was down, so we got to work!
Now we had to actually execute. Yikes.
First up was finding a helicopter company that could take us out on such short notice. We called 17 companies before finding one that could help.
Next, we needed feet on the ground. The sports marketing team looped in Jossi Wells, one of the brand’s athletes based in New Zealand. Then we needed someone to capture the content. As much as I wanted to hop on a plane, that wasn’t realistic with how quickly this was coming together. So we found local content creator Sophie Piearcey, and she absolutely crushed it. The whole thing was shot by one local creator with an iPhone.
We quickly storyboarded the video, and the team executed flawlessly.
By Monday morning, we were back at work. We’d finished editing our masterpiece of a social response video and were ready to hit publish.
Internally, though, there were still questions about whether we should engage. Someone asked, “Maybe we should just let this all blow over?”
Many marketers still didn’t take TikTok seriously or understand its impact on culture. It was a fair question!
But I knew in my gut that it was the right move. At the time, it was hard to articulate why. In hindsight, it’s clear: This was our opportunity to change the narrative. If we didn’t engage, the conversation would stay negative. If we did, we at least had a chance to turn it around.
And boy, was that worth gambling on. We hit publish, and the video immediately became one of The North Face’s most-viewed TikToks of all time. The response was hugely positive.
The content spread to other social channels and generated media coverage. This video still gets mentioned almost weekly on LinkedIn as a “masterclass in marketing.” None of that would have been possible if we hadn’t gambled.
There were so many things working in our favor. But we also didn’t stop when we heard no.
What if we’d given up after calling the sixteenth helicopter company?
What if we’d said, “Fuck it, it’s Friday. Let’s deal with this Monday”?
What if we’d decided it wasn’t worth engaging, and another brand had swooped in for its own viral moment?
People sometimes hear this story and think, “Well, my leadership would never say yes to this.” Honestly, mine wouldn’t have a year earlier, either. That trust came from months of building credibility, creating review processes, and earning it the boring way, long before the viral video happened. It’s built slowly and purposefully, and then one day, it lets you send a helicopter up a mountain.
In the age of AI, everyone is turning to data to make decisions. But data about what’s happened in the past can’t tell you everything about what to do next. It doesn’t replace empathy, human understanding, or that feeling when all the tiny hairs on your arms stand up. Pay attention to that feeling. It might take a minute to figure out why it’s there, but it’s worth listening to.
3. Resilience Is Required for Real-Time Marketing
If you want to succeed in a social media career, you need to be resilient. When one door closes, you need to bust through the window. You have to think on your feet and problem-solve in real time to post at the speed of culture.
How This Experience Helped Me Take More Risks in My Career
The more you get out of your comfort zone, the easier it gets. Having worked on corporate marketing teams for most of my career, pitching big ideas like this without fear doesn’t necessarily come naturally to me. But the more I do it, the easier it gets.
Without this viral social media experience, I probably wouldn’t have been brave enough to try something totally different and join a startup last year. Now I lead marketing at Popfly, where I help brands collaborate with adventure creators, many of whom shoot content from places only reachable by helicopter. Talk about a full-circle moment.