Inside Year Three of #OptOutside With REI’s Chief Creative Officer

Two years later, REI continues to evolve #OptOutside. New for Black Friday 2017 is what REI calls an “experiential search engine” at REI.com/optoutside, which collects user-generated content tagged #OptOutside on Instagram and combines it with real-time information about locations and experiences across the country. There will also be 20 UGC-heavy videos.

Adweek spoke with REI’s chief creative officer, Ben Steele, about the new activation, as well as what keeps #OptOutside fresh and differentiated in the marketplace. #OptOutside, he said, began as a program for employees, and that remains a key part of it. On Black Friday again this year, REI will close its 151 stores, process no online sales and pay all 12,000 employees not to come to work.

But #OptOutside has been adopted as a movement by consumers and by other companies and organizations, Steele added. Collecting that content, and organizing it with a search engine—in a way that’s inspirational but also practically useful—seemed like a great next step.

“We’ve been really blown away over the three years by what the impact and engagement with #OptOutside has been. It is not falsely humble to say our expectations for response were a heck of a lot more modest than what’s actually happened,” Steele said. “Millions of people who have used the platform of #OptOutside to tell their stories and celebrate their moments in the outdoors. That hashtag, #OptOutside, has become a part of the parlance of the outdoors. It’s a way people share their passion. That’s a view that we can see, but I’m not sure people can see that view themselves.”

The search engine now lets everyone see it, for free.

“You see a narrative of a life outdoors from the people who are actually living it, from someone who is summiting big mountains to someone who is stepping onto a trail for the first time,” says Steele. “We have 16 million members around the world. The notion that we could invent something more compelling around the outdoors than they could, would be foolish.”

#OptOutside was never meant to be a closed, REI-only campaign. It was meant to be a rallying cry. And indeed, more than 700 organizations have joined REI in supporting it in some form over the past two years. (One new partnership this year is with Lyft, which will be offering free rides to local parks this Friday in 10 cities—Portland, Ore., Phoenix, Denver, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Tucson, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Atlanta and Washington, D.C.)

But the campaign remains powerfully connected to REI’s brand, Steele said, largely because closing on Black Friday wasn’t just a stunt but was an expression of REI’s core purpose.

“The ability to claim that moment and say, this is about our values and not about transactions, is still pretty differentiating,” he said. “This is going to sound New Agey, but I think it’s a time for people to pause and be intentional about, How do I spend my time? Who am I with? Where am I going? Am I in the places that matter most to me? Or am I just going with the flow?”

#OptOutside is also, of course, still a very big deal for REI employees.

“It’s a top five sales day for us—or it was,” says Steele. “The reaction we got from employees when we announced it was huge, and really powerful. I’ve been in retail for 30 years, and I’ve never had this day off. I’ve spent Thanksgiving thinking about getting to my job the next day. That power is an annual thing. It’s not like it’s diminished over time.”

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