As AI floods the digital channel with content no one asked for, the brands that will win are the ones building somewhere real.

Brands spent the last decade perfecting the art of reaching people who weren’t paying attention. The scroll-past, the muted pre-roll, the “skip ad” button worn smooth by ten billion thumbs. An entire industry built around a medium everyone wishes they could ignore.

Generative AI is coming for that medium next. The cost of producing content has collapsed to near zero. Every brand, at every budget level, can now generate infinite variations of the ad nobody was watching to begin with. What that does is make already-scarce attention disappear entirely. In that environment, the premium doesn’t go to the brand with the best algorithm. It goes to the brand that gives people a reason to gather, the one that creates real connection.

The data has been making this argument for a while. Strava’s 2025 Year in Sport report found that new clubs on the platform nearly quadrupled in a single year. ¹ The previous year’s report added a behavioral dimension: 58 percent of Strava users said they made new friends through a fitness group, and average activity length increased by 40 percent when people exercised with ten or more others versus alone. ² People aren’t just joining clubs. They’re going farther together and coming back with something they didn’t have before. The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on loneliness framed the demand side: 15-to-24-year-olds spend roughly 70 percent less time with friends in person than they did two decades ago. ³ Digital gave people convenience. What it did not give them, and what they are now spending to find, is connection. The only medium that reliably delivers it is physical presence.

The brands that have figured this out fastest are not, for the most part, fly fishing brands. Snow Peak understood this before the data made it obvious. Dan Coe’s excellent piece in The Brand Report examined Snow Peak’s physical strategy in detail earlier this year. ⁴ While almost every other outdoor brand was doubling down on e-commerce, Snow Peak built a four-property physical portfolio in the U.S. The Portland flagship, designed by Skylab Architecture from salvaged 100-year-old Douglas fir beams, includes a covered outdoor demo bay and regular gear clinics. ⁵ On Washington’s Long Beach Peninsula, the brand opened a 25-acre campground featuring a cabin designed by Kengo Kuma, which Time named one of its 100 World’s Greatest Places in 2024. ⁶ In May 2026, Snow Peak signed into Seattle’s Fremont Collective alongside Black Diamond and evo, framing the move as “creating community-driven hubs where retail, outdoor recreation, and culture intersect.” ⁷ Snow Peak isn’t selling camping gear. It’s selling a way of being in the world, and using physical space to prove it.

YETI arrived at the same destination by a different road. Instead of physical retail as community, they built a film studio. YETI Presents has produced more than 75 short documentary films over a decade: films about anglers, ranchers, pitmasters, trappers and surfers, with no products on screen and no voice-over selling anything. Ad Age named YETI’s in-house creative team its 2024 In-House Agency of the Year. ⁸ Ten years of films had already told the customer exactly who YETI was for and what kind of life they were meant to live.

Tracksmith did the same thing for running at a smaller scale. The Trackhouse, at 285 Newbury Street in Boston, is not a store with events bolted on. It’s a cultural center that happens to sell apparel. Community runs depart from it regularly. Local groups use it as a meeting point. Tracksmith launched Hare A.C., a running club with annual membership priced at $128, including a racing vest, early product access and invites to in-person events. The brand grew nearly 280 percent over three years without a Super Bowl buy. ⁹ The community was the media plan.

None of these brands abandoned digital. Snow Peak sells online. YETI sells online. Tracksmith sells online. But all three understood that digital is the fulfillment layer, not the brand-building layer. The brand gets built somewhere people actually show up: physically, willingly, without being targeted. That distinction is going to widen as AI floods the interruption medium with more content than any human can process. The brands that figured this out early are sitting on a structural advantage. The brands still buying digital reach in a world of infinite digital content are paying a premium for noise.

Here is where the outdoor industry should be paying very close attention: fly fishing has been running this playbook for decades without calling it marketing. The sport is inherently physical and inherently communal. You cannot fish a river through a screen. Knowledge passes hand-to-hand: guide to client, club member to newcomer, parent to child. The pace of the sport, the silence it requires, the attention it demands, the shared discomfort of cold water and early mornings, these are the exact conditions under which human beings actually connect. Dozens of nonprofits didn’t independently arrive at fly fishing as a vehicle for healing veterans, women in recovery and people carrying grief by accident. The river creates something almost no other environment replicates: it requires presence, gives you something to do with your hands and puts you next to another person in a way that makes honesty easier.

Fishing the Good Fight is the program I know best. Jennings Hester founded it in November 2019. A former Alabama football player, he spent years not knowing that the anxiety and depression he was carrying was treatable. What he built is a community of men and therapists, using fly fishing as a gateway to mental health work. ¹⁰ The model is almost entirely physical: fly tying nights, fish-alongs, men’s groups and weekend retreats that pair time on private water with group counseling led by clinicians from Denver’s Elevated Wellness. In the winter, Off the Water events keep the community connected online. But the river is where the work happens. No app. No algorithm. Just a river, a rod and a reason to show up. In five years, Fishing the Good Fight has reached participants from twenty states and expanded into chapters in Colorado Springs and Atlanta, where local events have taken hold. What Hester understood, and what the river keeps proving, is that the sport doesn’t just fill time. It lowers the guard. And a lowered guard is where community actually starts.

The opportunity in front of the right fly fishing brand right now is not to sponsor this category. It is to own it: the way Snow Peak owns the campfire, the way Tracksmith owns the Saturday long run. The fly fishing industry generates roughly $3 billion in annual gear sales globally, ¹¹ but the gear is not the asset. The culture is. The 8.1 million Americans who fly fish ¹² are not defined by what they’re carrying. They are defined by what they’re looking for: time on moving water, genuine connection and the particular clarity that comes from being somewhere that requires your full presence. That is not a niche. It is an audience actively searching for exactly what the best brands in outdoor have already proven they will pay for.

Orvis has run fly fishing schools since 1966, introducing more people to the sport than any other brand in the country. The infrastructure exists. What Orvis has never done is make the gathering itself the brand story. That is the open lane. And the fact that Snow Peak, already the most intentional community builder in the outdoor industry, has now moved into fly fishing by acquiring Swift Fly Fishing and hosting river camps in the Catskills ¹³ should tell you something about where this is going. The native fly fishing brands have a window. It will not stay open.

The Instagram ad reaches people who weren’t looking for you. A weekend on the water, guided by your brand, reaches people who will never forget you were there.

Which brand outdoors do you think is closest to figuring this out?

Andrew Luter is the founder of Rio Chato Investments and the Substack: Notes From The Boat. He backs early-stage outdoor recreation and lifestyle brands, the kind of companies building gear and experiences for people who’d rather be outside. He’s based in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, which is basically a full-time reminder of why this space matters.

Disclosure: I serve on the board of Fishing the Good Fight.