Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc (UTMB)

The North Face wanted its presence at UTMB, the flagship ultra-trail race in Chamonix, to become a unifying storytelling moment that drove engagement, visibility and community energy across all markets and platforms. At a heavily sponsored tentpole event, its content competes with the race's own coverage and every other sponsor for the same week of attention. SAMY's reading was that endurance coverage defaults to splits, rankings and results, while the audience's real attachment is to the human drama of the race, so the human side of endurance, athletes' grit, connection and triumph, moves a broad social audience more than performance data.

SAMY placed emotion over performance and built an emotionally charged social ecosystem around race week, told through athlete and fan voices rather than the brand alone. During the 25 to 31 August 2025 race week it ran over 100 Instagram Stories, athlete collaborations and community reposts across Instagram, Facebook and Strava, with live community management to surface standout content and fuel real-time conversations as the race unfolded.

Treating the event as a storytelling platform rather than a sponsorship placement gave the brand a week of ownable content, though it required live staffing during the window, and Strava worked as a distribution channel in its own right for an outdoor brand. SAMY reports the campaign drove 65% of total organic engagements, a 1,684% month-on-month reach increase for Instagram Stories, 63% of total reach across channels and the top post of 2025 on Strava, though every figure comes from the agency's own archived case page, the percentages are published without denominators or time windows, and no independent source credits the work.