Mammut Challenges People To Get Off The Screens And Go Outside

Mammut, the premium Swiss mountain brand, is launching “Take a Hike,” a culture-hacking campaign that uses AI to combat online negativity. The campaign created with lead agency DEPT® is powered by Cliff, a first-of-its-kind AI chatbot to identify the internet’s most frustrated voices and invite them to swap their screens for the restorative benefits of the outdoors.

The campaign addresses a growing cultural tension: while the digital world has become frictionless, it has made people more restless. Mammut and DEPT® are leaning into the "Anti-Ease Culture" narrative, using scientific rationale to prove that the antidote to digital frustration is physical effort.

Research shows that a 90-minute nature walk actively decreases "rumination" (the repetitive negative thoughts often found in comment sections) and lowers neural activity in parts of the brain linked to mental illness.¹ Furthermore, just four days of immersion in nature, disconnected from multimedia and technology, has been shown to increase creative problem-solving performance by 50 percent.²

Engineering an AI Intervention

Cliff is not a standard chatbot; it is a sophisticated frustration tracker built on Python and hosted on Google Cloud Platform, using Gemini as its reasoning layer to navigate the nuance of human irritability. Built by DEPT®, it collects thousands of comments across YouTube and X , processing them through a proprietary four-part scoring framework - Frustration, Context, Sentiment, and Safety - to identify the moments where "internet rage" is at its peak.

By analysing tone the way a human community manager would - but at a scale no human team could match - Cliff surfaces up to 600 relevant conversations a day. It then arms Mammut’s team with on-brand, "spikey" responses, delivering the campaign’s core message exactly where it's needed most: “Take a Hike.”

"Take a Hike is about encouraging more people to get into the mountains more often, as a meaningful way to feel better, mentally and physically." said Nic Brandenberger, CMO at Mammut. "Science confirms that a simple hike in the outdoors can significantly improve directed-attention abilities compared to urban environments. So, by meeting people in the comment sections, we are challenging them to trade their screens for the trail."

“With ‘Take a Hike,’ we’ve found a way to deploy AI for a brand truth,” said Sasha Jackson, Associate Creative Director at DEPT®. “Cliff allows us to find people in their most frustrated digital moments and scale a real-world intervention. It’s not just tech for the sake of it; it’s using technology to facilitate the 50 percent increase in creative problem-solving that researchers see when humans disconnect from technology and immerse themselves in nature.”

The campaign will live across YouTube, X, Instagram, and TikTok, supported by a behind-the-scenes content series. Following the digital launch, the campaign will extend into the physical world with guerrilla Out-of-Home (OOH) activations designed to intercept consumers in high-stress urban environments and point them toward the peaks.

¹ Bratman, G.N. et al. (2015). "Nature experience reduces rumination and subgenual prefrontal cortex activation." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(28), 8567–8572. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1510459112

² Atchley, R.A., Strayer, D.L. & Atchley, P. (2012). "Creativity in the Wild: Improving Creative Reasoning through Immersion in Natural Settings." PLOS ONE, 7(12). https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0051474