The boldest ad of the year is a 40-year-old joke
A brilliant promotion, an inherited personality, and the test it sets for "bold."
Dan Coe
Jul 3
In December, Columbia's CEO filmed himself strolling through company headquarters, offering up everything in the building to anyone who could prove the Earth is flat: the photocopiers, the mannequins, the warehouse space. Last week, the industry gave him its top prize for it.
The campaign, Expedition Impossible, opened with a letter from Tim Boyle in The New York Times daring flat-earthers to "find the edge." The prize was the whole company. Or rather, a $100,000 LLC stuffed with office plants and props, which is the joke. At Cannes Lions 2026 it won the Grand Prix for Brand Experience and Activation, along with five more Lions. The jury president called it "a brilliant promotion. The kind of work this category was originally built to celebrate."
It would be easy to file this as a viral gag. We think it's something better: the rare stunt that carries the product claim inside it. Columbia's gear is built for the most extreme edge of the planet, so go find one it can't reach. The joke and the positioning are the same sentence. That's the line between a brilliant activation and a merely funny one, and it's what the jury was really rewarding.
It could also only have come from Columbia. Forty years ago the brand made its name on ads where Gert Boyle used her son, now the CEO, as a crash-test dummy for the gear. Self-deprecation is the family business. Expedition Impossible is Columbia remembering that, and aiming it at a target absurd enough to make the product impossible to ignore.
In the full feature we get into why the timing matters, what a Grand Prix is actually buying a brand still mid-turnaround, and the test the work sets for any CMO chasing "bold."
