There’s nothing quite as freeing as taking a naked hike through nature. Unfortunately, nude hiking is forbidden according to many state and local laws. Inconsistent regulations, coupled with cultural biases against nudity, make naked hiking extremely challenging to navigate, leaving this niche community somewhat lost in the woods.
But Bear Naked Granola believes people should be able to enjoy nature in whatever way they please, even if that’s bare naked. That’s why we teamed up to fuel a freehiking mission helping naked hikers navigate au naturel and making it easier than ever for people to get as close to nature as they please. With a timely launch to celebrate “National Nude Day” the attention-grabbing program engaged with audiences far and wide.
The key objective of the Naked Trails campaign is to create an ownable moment for Bear Naked Granola leading up to Naked Hiking Day 2023 and empower aspiring naked hikers while establishing Bear Naked Granola as a fun-loving, outdoorsy brand. Quantifiable goals of 32.3MM impressions and 16.4MM video views were set and ultimately outperformed due to the highly engaging and playful nature of the content.
The campaign included a diverse range of tactics to capture audiences across the Outside Network and beyond. Most notably, a highly-clickable interactive microsite housing custom content like 8 Naked Hiking Sensations You Aren’t Prepared For, or, Howdy Partner: 15 Casual Greetings for When You’re Caught Hiking in the Nude, and serving as the go-to hub for the program. A range of socially optimized video cutdowns, a hefty promotional schedule including leveraged creator channels, and an accompanying digital program were included to round out a full suite of high-impact tactics.
The strategically playful program highlighted a group of four influencers in the wild, using Outside Inc’s Gaia GPS app to (un)officially review which trails are nude friendly or not, with a secret emoji code(🐻🍑✅). Creators posted to their channels, with the content also leveraged across Outside-owned network channels on multiple social platforms, all working to drive traffic to the interactive hub or supporting articles. In tandem with the social aspect, custom emails, ROS, and high-impact digital units were deployed, working to drive traffic directly to client sites. Video ranging from :60 to :15 commercial cuts were engaged on OutsideTV to further awareness of the naked hiking initiative.
The program as a whole over-delivered by an average +13% with some key tactics such as the interactive hub seeing an over-delivery of +418% in terms of site traffic and a +40% over-delivery of social awareness across native channels. The social forward approach of this campaign saw high social sentiment and earned benchmark-breaking engagement rates of +18%. The Naked Trails campaign saw similar success across each pre-established KPI, from video views and completion rates, to near double benchmark CTRs on digital deployments and newsletter open rates over double network benchmarks.
Activating audiences across a diverse network of tactics and aligning with a light-hearted concept proved to be highly valuable, from both a top and bottom-of-funnel perspective. We extended the reach of the Bear Naked Granola brand and drove a large volume of traffic directly to Bear Naked pages or furthered consideration through engagement with branded content.
