Last winter, one of Black Diamond Equipment’s sponsored athletes, a world-class climber, agreed to take an up-and-coming outdoor social media influencer out for a day of ice climbing. The pair spent a routine day outside of Cooke City, Montana, top-roping a few moderate-grade routes, snapping pics and shooting video to post on the influencer’s feed. From the Black Diamond athlete’s point of view, the outing was an act of goodwill, an effort to help broaden ice climbing’s appeal by reaching a new audience.

Except that a day or so later, when the post appeared, the influencer had digitally altered one of the shots, erasing one strand of the top-rope belay to make it appear that he’d actually been lead-climbing. For both the athlete and Black Diamond, the Photoshopped depiction felt like more than a small betrayal—it verged on reputational liability. Black Diamond, after all, has been involved in several high-profile lawsuits over its gear, including the now legendary depiction of a failing harness in the 1993 Sylvester Stallone blockbuster Cliffhanger. The influencer’s fraud “was a nightmare scenario,” says Black Diamond’s sports-marketing director Adam Peters, and it reinforced the brand’s practice of working on social media solely with its stable of 33 world-class athletes. In other words, the brand doesn’t use ambassadors, influencers, or creators.

That position is not uncommon for core outdoor brands. In the ski space, Blizzard-Tecnica doesn’t use paid influencers in its marketing. And in bike, neither does Yeti Cycles, which also relies on its athletes and, like Blizzard-Tecnica, a diverse roster of ambassadors. In climb, Scarpa has a core team of athletes and has only occasionally hired influencers to create social media content. The hesitancy has to do with common sense: Especially in high risk sports, many brands just don’t want high-profile but untested individuals out there doing boneheaded things with their gear. Or maybe the core brands are just partial to backcountry skiing’s, mountain biking’s, and climbing’s anti-sellout roots. In the verticals, getting labeled as inauthentic can be a death blow.  

As the Black Diamond disappearing top rope story makes clear, remaining authentic is a perfectly rational approach to sports marketing. And it’s certainly a time tested method. But last year the Washington Post pegged the creator/influencer industry and its user generated “content” at $250 billion with no end of growth in sight. Which begs the question: How can athletes and brands stick to their guiding principles in the face of a burgeoning creator/influencer marketplace, the algorithms of which are designed by the biggest technology companies the world has ever known? 

The answer is that two things can be true at the same time. Athletes and brands can preserve their authenticity and credibility, while also winning the social media game to stand apart from the creator/influencer marketplace. In fact, we will argue below, professional athletes are better equipped to outperform influencers in the long run precisely because of their innate credibility.

A little background helps. The “team of athletes” approach to outdoor gear marketing has been around a long time. Eddie Bauer sponsored the first American team to summit Everest in 1963. In the early 1980s, K2’s Mahre brother ads and posters were ubiquitous in ski country, as were images of Scot Schmidt’s yellow The North Face duds later that decade. In the early ’90s, The North Face assembled their dream team—Lynn Hill, Alex Lowe, and Greg Child—and set them loose to land in National Geographic stories and films. By the late ’90s, surfers like Laird Hamilton and skaters like Tony Hawk became household names, as did the apparel brands they represented.

That model held through the early 2000s. But then real change arrived with the advent of the micro POV camera and then, just a few years later, YouTube. Red Bull seemed to understand exactly how to capitalize on both trends and many brands followed their lead—or tried to. By the 2010s, sports marketing was being reinvented. Instead of watching television or working, suddenly the world was watching another of Danny MacAskill’s urban bike trials shorts or Candide Thovex’s “One of Those Days 2” revolutionary ski action flicks. MacAskill and Thovex were athletes, but they were not just “talent,” they were athlete/creatives who specialized in video that performed well on the new mediums.

Then a funny thing happened on the way to smartphone ubiquity—the influencer generation began wriggling up out of Instagram’s primordial algorithms. The influencer movement began in fashion, but soon spilled over into the action sports and outdoor worlds. And suddenly there they were, hashtagging their way around the world in kitted out Sprinter vans, flashing rippling abs and drum-tight yoga pants amid weirdly flirtatious “content.” 

In short order, brands wanted their insulated mugs and down blankets arranged just so in influencers’ feeds, and marketing budgets began to tilt in the influencer direction. In 2018, media strategist Patrick Crawford, a former Freeskier editor and current social media strategist, cited Pew Research when he said, “the public’s trust in everything is declining, except for individuals who the public see as real and authentic. Those people can still reach audiences in a convincing way.” Crawford was advising that outdoor industry companies partner with influencers because the public wanted buying advice from people who they can relate to—not necessarily from physical aliens like Killian Jornet. “The typical influencer isn’t world class at their sports, but they are world class at working the algorithm,” says Crawford today.

Many in the industry felt offended by this shift, not least of all the athletic “aliens” on gear company payrolls who’d spent lifetimes honing their ability to sprint up mountain ridges or rail a surfboard in a barrel. But inevitably, as attention and eyeballs got harder to secure, athletes, team managers, and the marketing arms behind them could no longer simply set up film crews every quarter on exotic athlete-driven expeditions and hope that the resulting storytelling, which percolated up to vertical publications and annual film tours would be enough. 

So what can athletes and the brands who believe in them learn from the influencer/creator crowd? According to professional skier Sierra Schlag, there’s plenty, and it benefits an athlete’s bottom line to do so. After all, they are the ones taking the physical risks.

Before she hung out her shingle as an athlete, with sponsors like Atomic and OnX Backcountry, Schlag worked as online retail giant Evo’s social media manager, where she learned how the game is played. It was shocking stuff: “I saw how much more creators got paid than athletes, and it’s a pretty big gap,” she says.

Athletes, says Schlag, need to take a page from the influencer playbook and, in addition to the bigger passion projects they’re working on, which reinforce authenticity, feed the social media beast without wavering on credibility.

Not to do so is career suicide says Kevin Luby, a former magazine editor who now works as a digital marketing consultant with a specialty in making Meta perform for his clients. “The Meta algorithm is the most powerful marketing tool ever created,” says Luby. “Ignore it at your peril.”

Luby believes outdoor brands, and the athletes who represent them, should be working harder to master social media marketing. “I’d coach every one of my athletes to be more effective content creators, even if I’m already realizing value from the partnership in other ways—like coaching in-person clinics or film inclusions.”

Of course, like most things, that’s easier said than done. Because of tweaks to the Meta algorithm, Crawford admits that it’s hard to create predictable social media success with any given post. “Just because you spend a good chunk of money and make a cool short film, that doesn’t necessarily mean that many people will ever see it on social,” he says. “The distribution end can be a mystery. People are seeing less and less content from the people they follow.” Crawford wonders if even someone like Thovex could have the same success today with “One of Those Days 2” that he did in 2015.

To master the new algorithm, Schlag says, athletes have to be online a lot. She recommends at least 5–10 hours a week. She posts on Instagram and TikTok, but takes a bit of a hiatus in the summer, which she says is fine because her audience is coming to her for snow content. It takes time to build an audience, but that is still the initial goal. “Algorithms come and go, but if you have built an audience, they’ll stick with you,” she says.

Yeti Cycles CEO Chris Conroy points to Nate Hills and his “Friday Followcam” videos as an example of someone who has built and maintained a huge audience over the years, making him one of the bike brand’s most valuable marketing partners. In Hills’ case, he doesn’t spend inordinate amounts of time with edits. But he does spend inordinate amounts of time on his bike riding with fellow pros or capturing events. “He is a machine,” says Conroy. “He’s got life figured out.”

Even with a solid YouTube and Instagram following, though, Hills is adapting to those algorithms in a few important ways. In addition to his 10- to 20-minute long “Followcam” edits, Hills posts shorts on Instagram and YouTube, and he makes them vertical because that’s how the audience watches videos on smartphones. Figuring out what works and what doesn’t is challenging, but it’s worth the effort. As the marketer Luby says, paraphrasing famed YouTube creator Mr. Beast. “Anytime you say the word algorithm, just replace it with ‘audience.’ The algorithm didn’t like that video? No. The audience didn’t like that video.”

Another important wrinkle, says Schlag, is that on Instagram, athletes should create Reels rather than Posts because the algorithm that controls Posts mostly pushes them to that account’s followers, whereas the one that controls Reels will feed them to the entire network. Crawford says that the metric he looks at for gauging success is whether the account’s Reels regularly exceeds its follower numbers. Candide Thovex is a good example. He’s got 1.2 million Instagram followers but his Reels average more like 3 million views. Across his social media accounts, today he’s mostly posting videos shorter than a minute, and like him, they go huge.

Neither Thovex nor Hills do much talking to the camera, but with their followings they don’t really need to. Most athletes should however, says Schlag. In a feed that’s now “full of advertisements and influencers plugging stuff, people want real content,” she says, and the easiest way to do that is to talk to the camera about something relatable. The freeride mountain biker and YouTube phenom Rémy Métallier always walks viewers through his recon—and talks openly about crashes and how to learn from them.

In her feed, says Schlag, some of her most popular posts are those where she talks about her struggles, like say, coming back from injuries. What she knows works but can’t bring herself to do is to make posts that are especially cringey or sexed-up. “My rule of thumb is whether I’d feel awkward if a random friend from college saw my post,” she says. “But I know that the people who are willing to go there are getting paid a lot more than I am.”

There are other viewership boosting techniques that Schlag does practice though. The first is to use trending songs. The second is to engage within the comments. Accounts that are highly engaged both in the comments sections of their own posts and within the comments sections of other accounts are rewarded by the algorithm.

Engaging with the audience isn’t for everyone, but if an athlete can pull it off, it delivers results. The Canadian Olympic cyclist Alison Jackson likes to dance in her reels, and former Olympic marathoner Molly Seidel does a lot of talking directly to the camera. Both lack the kind of spine tingling action clips that MacAskill, Thovex, Hills, and Schlag regularly post, but they’re legit athletes making social media work for them. Seidel’s most popular reel of 2024 touted a new watch from her sponsor Coros. Jackson’s, by more than 5 million views, was the announcement of a limited edition Poc-Cannondale colab helmet.

Of course, all this advice must be filtered for the individual athletes and the brands that support them. Athletes should never compromise their credibility for clicks. “The main thing we don’t want to do is turn our athletes’ social media feeds into a Black Diamond ad,” says Peters.

Even for core brands and athletes a strong social media presence and the ability to leverage it is part of the portfolio. Black Diamond holds an annual athlete summit and periodic marketing calls with their athlete team to help them understand the product and cover best social media practices. Yeti and Blizzard-Tecnica both hold periodic marketing calls and push product info and marketing assets to their athlete and ambassador teams. Even for core brands, athletes need to be fluent in social media—while they still pursue their loftier athletic and creative goals.

It’s not just about performing athletic feats in front of the camera anymore—although that will never go away. Like Cody Townsend (150,000 YouTube subscribers and 1.5 million views), who takes his audience on his adventures in a casual documentary style, and Rémy Métailler (600,000 YouTube subscribers), whose feed functions like a virtual clinic for aspiring freeriders, the idea is to use the creativity that informs your athleticism and channel it into new mediums. Townsend and Métailler’s video series are as well edited and watchable as many festival-worthy short films.

And that’s another point to drive home. If, as an athlete, the prospect of promoting yourself on social media still makes you sigh, know this. The skills that make you a better social marketer are worth building no matter your long-term plans. Those early athletes that represented brands long before algorithms on social media were a thing? The ones with staying power became adept at understanding product, branding, and talking to the camera without sacrificing their credibility. Despite Tony Hawk’s commercial omnipresence, no one thinks of him as a sellout—because he’s still a skater first.

The do-it-yourself production skills are also meaningful. Even if you’re only shooting video on your phone, you are learning how to frame shots and edit. A 10 minute cut needs a beginning, middle, and an ending, just like the feature films so many athletes dream of producing do. Maybe those skills will serve you as you progress from athlete to athlete/creative—the natural counterpunch to influencer/creator.