Yeti CMO Paulie Dery on the brand’s new viral ads, sustainability

Jul 18, 2023

The posters, created in-house, frame the choice for consumers in the simplest terms.

In 2009, three years after its founding by two brothers in Austin, Texas, Yeti released an ad online that would put the company on the map. It featured footage of a grizzly bear trying for an hour to rip open a Yeti Tundra cooler—and failing completely.

The stunt was a sensation. It quickly earned Yeti coolers a reputation for being bear-proof. And it introduced a marketing strategy at Yeti that would endure—what they refer to internally as “feats of strength,” where they put the products through their paces to prove them worthy of their premium price.

Fourteen years later, Yeti has grown to $1.6 billion in sales, thanks in part to its 2017 expansion into drinkware, which is now two-thirds of the business. And it’s currently enjoying another viral moment—on a more limited scale—featuring a twist on the “feats of strength” idea, focused on sustainability.

A series of out-of-home ads—created in-house and appearing in New York City, Los Angeles, Boston and Chicago—show Yeti coolers, cups and bags next to single-use plastic and styrofoam products. Short, snappy copy lines contrast the durability of the former with the disposability of the latter.

In one ad, while a styrofoam cooler takes “Generations to break down,” a Yeti cooler takes “Generations to break in.” In another, disposable plastic bottles are “Single use,” while reusable Yeti bottles are for “Every single use.”

The ads have been flying around social media. A recent LinkedIn post from Paulie Dery, Yeti’s chief marketing officer, sharing the ads received nearly 35,000 likes—quite the stamp of approval from the creative community.

In an interview with Ad Age last week, Dery explained the genesis of the campaign, suggesting the approach is really just a continuation of “feats of strengths”—but with a twist.

“That bear [from the 2009 ad] sold more coolers than any marketer on the planet because it was a feat of strength,” he said. “[The new campaign] is just a different kind of feat of strength. It’s a feat of strength for the future. It’s a much more positive angle. I really love that pivot from us.”

The bear campaign did have a purpose-driven element—at the end of the video, Ryan Seiders, Yeti’s co-founder, tells viewers that impenetrable coolers are good for bears, too, since often “a fed bear is a dead bear.” But the focus was more on the quality of the product, rather than how it helps the environment.

In the years since, though, as environmentalism has surged, Yeti has fully embraced the notion of durability as sustainability. It’s a natural path forward for a brand that’s long prided itself on making products you only have to buy once—and a resonant one for today’s consumers, particularly Gen Z.

“We always say we were built out of frustration,” Dery said. “We built a cooler because all other coolers sucked. You couldn’t use your cooler as a fishing platform on your boat because it would break. You couldn’t stay out and fish very long because your ice would melt. So we set out to make something that you just have to buy once. And 17 years later, that message has never been truer.”

Watch: Purpose marketing hits and misses

As the new campaign shows, when your product is proof of your sustainability, then your sustainability advertising can double as your product advertising. This is what allows the new ads to be so simple and breakthrough—since a simple product shot is itself the argument for how to solve the problem at hand.

“There’s a lot of purpose-driven advertising in the world, and a lot of it gets a little cloudy,” Dery said. “The fact that you should never see Yeti in a landfill is a fantastic sustainability message, but it's also just a great product message. I see these as just product ads. And if you’re unaware of how durable these products are, then hopefully they educate you so you can get behind our premium pricing, by understanding the value of what that longevity gives you.”

The clever copy lines are the cherry on top—using as few words as possible to put the power in the hands of the consumer to choose between a distressing future and a hopeful one. (Dery is a CMO with a creative background—he originally joined Yeti as VP of creative in 2019, following three years as executive creative director at Uber, and eight years before that as a CD at R/GA.)

“I love that it’s not super preachy, too,” said Dery. “It’s pretty matter-of-fact. Our product is built to last. We’ve always had a history, I think, of good writing—we have billboards over our stores where we like to flex our copywriting muscles. And it’s also about having a point of view, right? Having a point of view as a brand is good. We’ve always used copy to really hammer that home.”

Still, as good as Yeti product may be for the planet, product advertising is, in the end, just talk. The company is backing it up with a host of activations and partnerships to round out its sustainability marketing.

Yeti was the official hydration sponsor of Lollapalooza in Chicago this year, selling Yeti products but also allowing anyone with a reusable vessel to refill it with water at the festival. It has a stadium program, where it’s working with college and pro venues to eliminate single-use plastics by selling Yeti cups you can keep. It has a new deal with the University of Southern California to give every incoming freshmen a Yeti bottle in their welcome pack. And it has rescue and buyback programs, where it resells or recycles old products that would otherwise be thrown out.

These efforts show Yeti’s commitments in action, not just as words on billboards.

“What we look at is, ‘Do, don’t say,’” Dery said. “You have to continually push the product you’re putting out into the world to back up the sentiment. There’s no way to smooth over that if it doesn’t exist. You can’t con a consumer today with a sustainable message if there isn’t an absolute undeniable truth to the product and brand.”

One final thing that lends credibility to Yeti’s sustainability approach—that in many ways it isn’t an altruistic message but a selfish one.

“Single-use plastics are a real problem for our fisheries and our riverways—the places where Yeti folks love to play,” said Dery. “To provide a solution that limits that damage is a tremendous asset for us. It’s something we can help with. It’s been our ethos for a very long time, and it’s coming through in our product marketing, as we’re seeing now with this campaign.”

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Tim Nudd is Creativity editor at Ad Age.