Greg Williams has worn many hats at Backbone, originally joining the agency in 2005 as a PR Account Manager. He later led the launch of Backbone’s Paid Media and Social Media services, becoming VP of Media and helping to shape the agency’s integrated approach. In 2022, Greg became President and now supports both the paid and earned media teams. Outside the office, Greg is a longtime youth basketball coach and enjoys climbing, biking, and dog hikes.
Tell us about Backbone – who are you and what do you do?
Backbone is an integrated marketing agency headquartered in Carbondale, Colorado, about 30 minutes from Aspen. We started 28 years ago with a simple question: can you do world-class marketing work from a mountain town? We’ve been fortunate to prove that you can, and today we partner with some iconic active lifestyle brands in the active lifestyle, outdoor, hunt/fish, health & wellness, and tourism categories.
At a high level, we help brands build influence from the inside out, then scale that story across channels, and tie it back to measurable impact with strong analytics. We have more than 100 employees across our mountain office in Carbondale, our city office in Denver, and around the country.
Backbone started as a boutique PR agency serving core outdoor brands. How has the agency evolved and expanded to serve a broader range of clients?
The simplest answer is: we’ve evolved the way the industry evolved. Over the years, we’ve expanded our service offerings to meet the market, and now we offer more than a dozen services. Some brands come to us for a single, standalone service, and others want an integrated mix. We’re built to do both.
A big driver of change has been trust. Our PR roots led to long-term relationships, and those relationships opened the door to experimenting and expanding what we do together. We’ve worked with Black Diamond for 29 years, Smartwool for 16 years, Gerber for 20 years, and YETI for 12 years.
Structurally, we focus our work into two big buckets: paid and earned. But we also really like playing in the gray area between paid and earned, because that’s often where the magic is.
How is Backbone different compared to other marketing agencies?
Culture is our biggest differentiator. Agency life can be known for burnout and “busy” as a badge of honor. We’ve always prioritized the mythical work-life balance, because happier teams do better work, full stop.
We offer a powder clause so people can flex hours to ski when it dumps snow (or when it’s randomly 65 degrees in winter and you want to sneak in a hike). We do one-of-a-kind all-agency gatherings, our annual “retreat” is called The Charge because we don’t retreat, we charge. At The Charge we’ll do a business meeting, then outdoor activities, games, big meals, a little gambling, and all 100+ of us camp under the stars together. It’s a super unique perk of working at Backbone. We also offer a wellness benefit each month, and that’s just scratching the surface.
Beyond culture, we genuinely believe in the brands and products we work with. We try to staff teams based on real passions, so if you’re an avid skier and surfer, you’re more likely to work on brands in those worlds. We’re the end user, we speak the language, and it makes the work sharper.
How is Backbone leveraging AI and other emerging technologies to enhance its services?
We use AI in a smart, intentional way. It’s embedded into our workstreams so we can optimize the process stuff and spend more time on the creative and strategic work that really moves the needle.
A big recent move for us is a newer service anchored in AI: Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). The idea behind AEO as a service is that AI-driven search, Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, all of it, is reshaping how people discover brands. AEO connects PR, SEO, and AI intelligence so your brand shows up where it matters in LLM-powered answers.
Our AEO service offering is about making a brand’s earned and owned content discoverable in AI search, and we think about it through three pillars: Visibility (benchmark and improve presence in AI results), Optimization (build AI-friendly, SEO-structured content), and Integration (unify PR, SEO, and affiliate for cross-channel visibility).
You have decade plus relationships with category-leading brands like YETI, Smartwool, and Black Diamond. What do you think sets Backbone apart in building long-term partnerships with its brand partners?
Our core strategic philosophy has led to consistent success and long-term partnerships. We call it BCP, or Brand, Community, and Performance. We think of it like a three-legged stool: Community is how you go deep, build credibility, and earn your place. Brand is how you scale that story and reach new consumers without losing what made it resonate in the first place. Performance is what drives audiences to commerce or conversion outcomes, and it gets smarter and more effective when it’s informed by strong community and brand signals.
Performance agencies aren’t unique, nor are agencies that can produce wide-reaching global campaigns, nor boutique shops that connect with nice communities. What is unique is to bring together deep community connections, brand-building scale, and commerce-driven performance under one agency’s roof. That’s the sweet spot we’ve worked hard to build, and it’s been central to a lot of our long-term partnerships.
Say more about your strategic philosophy of Brand, Community, and Performance. Can you share a specific example of how Community efforts come to life?
BCP is simple, but it has a lot of range. A few quick “what it isn’t,” because people sometimes assume the wrong thing:
- BCP is not a funnel, nor is it a customer journey, both of which are structures for sequential messaging in which brands speak to consumers at different points of need, desire, or intention. The BCP strategy lives alongside the customer journey but does not replace it. It articulates an essential, holistic position that generates longevity, builds brand, and keeps an eye on the bottom line.
- BCP is not a fixed state, nor is it expressed in a single moment in time. It’s a dynamic balance that fluctuates over time, with investment in brand-building, deep connections, or commerce goals shifting throughout the weeks, months, and years.
- “Brand,” in BCP, is not just about branding. It’s about building brand through a groundswell of big and small moves that help consumers believe in what you have to offer.
- BCP is not optional. For brands big and small in the active lifestyle space and beyond to succeed in the short and long term, each piece of the BCP strategic pie is essential.
A good community example is YETI. YETI was born out of the niche salt-water fly fishing community, and they had to prove the product could stand up to the pursuit before the community would embrace the brand. While other cooler brands chased big-box shelf space, YETI doubled down on fishing and hunting ambassadors with a grassroots, people-first approach. And even as they expanded into new categories and went more mainstream, they kept investing in the people, publications, and projects that mattered in their core communities: mountain sports, culinary, surfing, and beyond. That “depth before breadth” mindset is a perfect community playbook.
Can you share a specific example of how Brand efforts come to life?
One example I love is our work with Altra Running on the Experience a New High campaign. Altra has deep roots in trail running with a passionate core community, and the goal with this campaign was to build relevance with a new generation of runners, specifically younger female road runners.
With a strong creative concept from Altra, we took their community roots and built breadth through high-impact out of home throughout Denver, digital out of home at the Denver airport, a summer-long sponsorship of the perpetually sold-out Yoga on the Rocks series, grassroots run club engagements, guerrilla-style stencil OOH along sponsored Strava segments, and a 12-stop “Dopamine Dealer” event tour. It became a real 360º center of gravity for young Colorado runners to step into Altra’s world, without losing the brand’s core credibility.
Can you share a specific example of how Performance efforts come to life?
Our work with Smartwool is a great example of how performance can amplify brand and community efforts. Smartwool makes relevance the “true north” by dividing audiences into passion-led “aspirationals” and intent-based “buying targets,” so every touchpoint feels personal. Then we use interest signals to deliver activity-specific creative, like breathable-sock ads for runners, and that tactic helped significantly elevate conversion rates. The Smartwool approach shows us just how fruitful performance marketing can be when it augments instead of replacing brand and community strategies.
In general, Performance marketing should be thought of as much closer to point of sale than brand and community efforts. In a time when digital commerce occurs not only on DTC websites, but across online retailers, in-platform on social channels, within search results, and in AI chatbot responses, performance ads are akin to an in-store display—albeit a display that understands its targets’ interests, habits, and digital history.
What are the biggest trends in marketing that you believe will shape the industry in the next 3-5 years?
Two big ones stand out. First: the evolution of earned media from being a cleanly defined thing called PR to becoming a much more sprawling group of touchpoints that all work together produce third-party validation in one way or another. Traditional PR, influencers, affiliate, AEO, YouTube, Substack—it all will need to function holistically to reach consumers along their unique media journeys, or else we’ll risk missing the mark as people’s media bubbles become smaller and more fragmented.
Second: we see a dual trend of machine-learning ad tech reinforcing digital niches alongside a renewed consumer thirst for IRL interactions. As AI evolutions like Meta’s Andromeda ad retrieval tech take us further down the path of hyper-optimized ad content and largely take control of digital audience targeting (a trend we certainly must embrace and work with), consumers are also going to seek out tangible, real-world interactions with brands to fight digital fatigue and find brands they can trust. As the digital noise gets noisier, people will try to find some quiet.
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Backbone has always been built around a simple idea: do great work, stay close to the communities that shape culture, and drive real results. If you’re a brand looking for a partner to help with anything from earned and paid strategy to creative, analytics, retail marketing, affiliate, or figuring out what AI search means for your business, we’d love to talk and see where we can help.
