May means change. As the weather warms up we’re switching from spring backcountry skiing to cycling, rock climbing, paddling, fly fishing and running–moving seamlessly from alpine snow to swollen rivers, sticky dirt and dry rock. (Of course, Ajax just announced they’re reopening for skiing this weekend.)
May at Backbone is bringing lots of change as well. Joining the media team are Page Kelley, who comes to us from Mindshare in Chicago, and Amanda Boyle from a little company called Google. Katie Wolitarsky is migrating from our Jackson office to our Denver locale at Battery 621 and Erik Wardell joins us full-time in Carbondale.
New clients joining the Backbone roster include RiverRestoration, Opedix, Yeti Coolers and Sperry Top-Sider–all of which are off to strong starts.
For example, we kicked off our work with RiverRestoration by piggybacking a White House-embargoed release about a new Urban Waters designation for Grand Rapids, Michigan. We timed our own release to post on the wire just as the White House news hit and as a result we landed coverage for our client in outlets ranging from CNBC, to Yahoo Finance, Bloomberg Business and the Washington Post.
Backbone also has been active on an unbranded content experiment with Camp 4 Collective called “Pause.” What started as a conversation over breakfast with Nate, Greg, Anson and Renan has has taken shape over the last two months.
Loosely defined, Pause is a reaction to social platforms that have seemingly been overrun by branded content. Collectively, we wondered if there was still a place and demand for agnostic, beautiful imagery and video? We launched the project anonymously at first, to test its organic virality. Only just recently did Adventure Journal out us (because Cas was working on an almost identical program). Over time we plan to push Pause with targeted paid promotion, to compare results. For us, Pause is a fun, creative project, that will help us continue to explore and learn what drives people to view content.
Lastly, the month of May means sales meetings and lots of travel (click the map above to see where we’ve been). From NYC, to Santa Barbara, London, Salt Lake City, Grand Rapids, Portland, Telluride, Estes Park, Austin, Lexington, and Fresno, our team is on the road.
See you out there-or maybe just in Concourse B.