Maurten Enlists Kilian Jornet For Unusual, Mountaintop Campaign
Imagine creating a product so groundbreaking, that legally you weren’t allowed to advertise it. This paradoxical conundrum was one that faced sports nutrition company, Maurten.
So how did they get around it? Their campaign didn’t mention the product at all. Nor did it use pithy product benefits, or an emotional payoff that brands usually desire in their advertising.
With the help of creative agency APE_CC, Maurten took to the mountains with iconic ultra runner, Kilian Jornet and tasked him with reading a whole scientific study. And not just that, he was also ran whilst reading… on a treadmill.
APE_CC
The 40 minute video sees Kilian run a cool 30km in the Norwegian mountains where he lives. Why? To experience familiar surroundings but from a new perspective - an approach that Maurten themselves adopted when innovating such a radical and pioneering product. The brand renowned for their hydrogel technology, stated:
Bringing a treadmill to the mountains gave him [Kilian] a new perspective on the paths he’d run a trillion times. It made him feel the wind, look at the ridges and the valleys — all these familiar views — in a new light. Made him discover all that he usually overlooks.
“Blinkered by the status quo, we all overlook alternatives. Daring to be bold and to challenge acceptance of established practice is the essence of innovation. Only when you step back and see the wider landscape do you give yourself space to ask questions. Solutions are harder to see when you’re close to the problem. Even in places where many feet have already walked, it's possible to find a new path — to do things differently and reveal new potential.”
So what is this magical product?
The product in question is The Maurten Bicarb System, an revolutionary sports fuel designed to help athletes push the boundaries of their physical effort and power during high-intensity exercise, all without the typical gastrointestinal discomfort you often get with gels and supplements.
The research paper that Kilian Jornet narrates concludes that The Maurten Bicarb System causes acid–base balance responses similar to existing products on the market, however it almost eliminates the gastrointestinal symptoms that many athletes feel taking pre-workout supplements.
It was also stressed that more research is now needed to directly quantify the apparent performance enhancing effects of this new “supplement ingestion strategy” on different exercise types (as research has only been carried out on 12 well-trained cyclists).
Is this campaign cool?
The campaign falls way outside of typical marketing and you’d seemingly be hard-pressed to find many people willing to watch a 40 minute narration of a detailed scientific paper, regardless of the fact they’ve got Kilian Jornet to read it, and some of the most beautiful alpine vistas captured with some stunning videography (That being said, the video does boast over 2,000 views on YouTube).
This campaign is a vanity project. And that is meant in the best possible sense. It’s one for the endurance purists, for fame and for headlines and not the mainstream. It’s as niche as it gets, but it’s artistic beauty is matched only by the innovation of the product in question. So yes. This campaign is cool.
