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# Columbia Will Mail You a Free Fleece if You Fax It In, and the Fax Was the Easy Part
- URL: https://giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io/the-fax-was-easy/
- Published: 2026-09-16T14:15:15.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-16T14:18:01.000Z
- Description: Everybody read the fax stunt as a friction filter that finds your real customers. Read what Columbia's head of marketing actually said about the media plan, then read the number in the fine print of the Domino's giveaway. Plus the post, the still and a five shot video.
- Author: giovanni gallucci
- Tags: Organic Social, Brand Positioning, Consumer Trends, creator-brands

*Listen to this episode of The Daily Trend Report, then use the piece below.*

[Columbia Sportswear](https://www.linkedin.com/company/columbia-sportswear?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) will mail you a fleece for free. You have to fax them the order.

That's the entire mechanic. Find a working fax machine in 2026, send in an order for one of the '90s Helvetia pullovers, and a real fleece shows up at your house. Peter Adams at Marketing Dive [published a Q&A on Monday](https://www.marketingdive.com/news/how-columbias-marketing-breaks-through-with-fax-machines-flat-earth/829991/?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) with Matt Sutton, who has run Columbia's marketing for exactly two years as of that morning, and the fax bit is in there alongside the rest of the brand's recent work.

Everybody passing this around has the same read, and I had it too for about an hour. Friction is a filter. We spent twenty years deleting every obstacle between a person and a purchase, one tap, autofill, save the card, don't make them think, and we got what we asked for, which is that a tap now means nothing at all. So anybody who drove to a print shop really wanted that fleece. Columbia ends up with a short list of people who care instead of ten thousand strangers who hit a heart on the way to something else.

Good story. Then I read what Sutton actually said.

He never mentions the filter. Not once in eight minutes of transcript. No lead quality, no list, no talk of the fax as a sorting mechanism. What he talks about is the media plan. He says Columbia "shifted investments from long-tail, programmatic media into higher-attention channels." He turned direct mail back on after years of not running it. He went from working with a few dozen creators a year to several hundred. He calls the whole thing "a wholesale shift from media planning into attention planning." And the fax activation itself, in the same article, runs on a paid partnership with the creator Ken Eurich.

So the fax is the reason to look. It isn't the machinery underneath. Columbia bought a large pile of attention and then hung something strange on it, and the strange thing is what got written up. Pull the spend out and you have an unknown brand asking people to go find a fax machine, which isn't a campaign, it's a dare nobody hears.

The other thing in that piece corrects the pairing everybody keeps making. The flat Earth stunt, where CEO Tim Boyle took out an open letter offering the company's assets to anyone who could locate the edge of the planet, is not a companion piece to the fax. Marketing Dive [covered that campaign on December 2, 2025](https://www.marketingdive.com/news/columbia-challenges-flat-earthers-as-part-of-bolder-marketing-revamp/806761/?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io), and it went on to win the [Grand Prix in Brand Experience and Activation](https://www.contagious.com/en/article/cannes-lions-2026-brand-experience-activation-winners-663903e7f6364a95b8bb2634bd52b513?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) at Cannes this June, Columbia's first time at the festival. Nine months and a Grand Prix separate the two. That history is a decent part of why a trade reporter takes the meeting about a fax machine at all.

## The version with a number on it

[Domino's](https://www.linkedin.com/company/dominos?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) is running the big budget edition of the same idea and it's more useful, because Domino's put a number on it in writing.

The [press release went out August 31](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/dominos-asks-america-is-the-domino-pizzas-first-fast-food-icon-302861955.html?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) from Ann Arbor. New product called the Domino, a Detroit style personal pizza shaped like the logo, cut into two slices. Buy a Big Mac, a Whopper, a Crunchwrap Supreme, a Chick-fil-A sandwich or a Chipotle burrito, upload the receipt, and they email you a code for a free one. Kate Trumbull, the chief marketing officer, frames it as asking America whether the thing has earned a spot among the icons.

Here's the part that matters and it's in the fine print, not the headline. The offer window runs 8/31 through 9/30 or until the codes run out. A minimum of 105,375 codes are available. The giveaway is capped at one million dollars of product. Domino's decided in advance exactly how many competitor receipts it was willing to buy and at roughly what price. Do that division yourself and you land near nine and a half dollars a code, which is my arithmetic off their two published figures and not a number the company printed.

And read one line further. The terms open with NO PURCHASE NECESSARY, and they say plainly that you can participate without uploading a receipt at all. Which means the receipt was never a gate. It legally cannot be one in a US promotion of this kind. The friction that the whole campaign appears to run on is optional by law, and the company disclosed that on day one in its own release.

Two campaigns, both read by the trade as clever filters, and neither one is a filter. One is a prop on top of a big attention buy. The other is a sweepstakes with a required escape hatch. What did the work in both cases was somebody paying to put the thing in front of people.

## What a food or beverage operator does with this on Wednesday

Don't copy the fax. You can't afford what sits behind it. Copy the cap.

Decide the number before you design the mechanic. How many real names, with a town attached, is this worth to you this quarter? Forty? Two hundred? Write it down, then work backward to what you're willing to spend to get them, then pick an ask that's interesting enough to survive being seen. The order matters. Most brands pick a cute mechanic first, post it once at 11am on a Tuesday, get eleven entries, and conclude that their audience doesn't engage. Their audience never saw it.

The small ask still has to be funny or interesting on its own merit. A seven field form is a tollbooth and people know the difference on sight. And you have to pay off everyone who clears it, because if somebody goes to trouble for you and gets an autoresponder, you've taught your best customer something you can't unteach.

**Pasteable post, use it today.** "We're sending 40 people a \[product\] this month. No tag, no share, no follow required. Here's the ask: tell us the name of the store where you first found us, and the town it's in. That's it. First 40 real answers get a box. If we've never been on a shelf near you, say that instead and we'll count it." Run it as a post, then put money behind it. Boost it to your own customer list first and your regional radius second. A giveaway with no distribution behind it is a private event you threw for yourself.

**Still direction.** One overhead frame on a plain surface, shot in window light. The product, a notepad, and a pen, with a short handwritten list of first names and towns already on the pad, four or five entries, no last names and nothing readable beyond that. No graphics, no arrows, no countdown badge, no phone in frame. The picture should look like somebody is keeping a list by hand, because that's the promise you're making.

**Shot listed video, 20 seconds, five shots, shoot it today.** Shot one, three seconds, hands setting the notepad down next to the product. Shot two, four seconds, close on the pen writing one name and one town. Shot three, four seconds, the real shelf or cooler where a customer would have found you, wide, no cleanup. Shot four, five seconds, one person on your team saying the ask out loud in one sentence, no script read, no intro, no logo bumper. Shot five, four seconds, back on the pad, now with a few more lines on it. Caption carries the ask again in the first line. No music bed. Put the same money behind it you'd have put behind a product post, which is the only part of this that anybody skips.

**The free internal move.** Pull your last thirty posts and count how many people you can name from them. Not reach, not saves, names. If the answer is zero, every one of those posts was admiration, and admiration is a dead end street. Then take the one post that produced the most actual replies and look at what it asked for. That's your mechanic, and you already paid for the research.

Today's episode also covered Illinois putting a ten percent gross receipts tax on targeted advertising services along with a per user fee on the platforms, plus the NetChoice suit filed in Cook County on September 11, and a stretch of FTC enforcement on Made in USA origin claims. Both are worth your morning. One note before anybody builds a piece around it: the FTC letters to Amazon and Walmart about third party marketplace listings are dated July 2025, not this summer, so treat that as background and not as news. The show is the briefing, this piece is the extension, and the post is what you actually do with it. Subscribe to The Daily Trend Report on [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-daily-trends-report/id1896763846?i=1000785549310&ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) or [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/033jcZwbZNGKpeUTRJvt1J?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io).

If you're a food or beverage brand opening a channel, or restarting one you let go quiet, the first month decides the next two years. I build the voice and the content plan before the first post goes out. Find me on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/galluccinet?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io).