The flat-earth community has spent decades insisting that the world ends somewhere, if only the rest of us would bother to look. Columbia Sportswear, the 88-year-old outdoor apparel company based in Portland, Ore., decided last year to take them up on it — or at least to pretend to, with a straight enough face that the mail is still arriving.

"We are still getting multiple emails a week, every week," said Matt Sutton, head of marketing at Columbia, which offered $100,000 to anyone who could produce a photograph of the actual edge of the world. The company went so far as to register a shell company with the Oregon Secretary of State to hold the prize money, a detail that suggests someone in the legal department had an unexpectedly interesting quarter.

The campaign, called "Expedition Impossible," was created by Adam & Eve/TBWA, which is part of the Omnicom Group, and featured an open letter in The New York Times from Tim Boyle, Columbia's chairman and chief executive, along with billboards and a hero film that Mr. Boyle recorded in a single take. (Preparation time: roughly three minutes, which is either admirable efficiency or a comment on how often Mr. Boyle has been asked to appear in his own advertising.)

At the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity this year, the campaign won 10 Lions, including the Grand Prix in Brand Experience and Activation — a considerable haul for a brand that had not previously made much of a habit of attending.

Joe Boyle, the company's president and Tim Boyle's son, said the search for a new agency began two years ago, when he wrote directly to more than a dozen shops asking for "work that most people would be too nervous to approve." He toured the finalists himself before settling on Adam & Eve/TBWA.

The fine print of the contest ruled out, among other things, "a clifftop in Seattle" and "your buddy Dave legally changing his name to 'The Edge.'"

Mr. Boyle said his grandmother, Gert Boyle, who appeared in Columbia's advertising for decades under the tagline "One Tough Mother," would have been proud of the work. "But it wouldn't be good enough for her," he added. "She'd be expecting what came next."

That is, of course, the question that award-winning campaigns tend to leave behind, hanging in the air like a dare no one has yet accepted.

Original story published in The Drum: "Why Columbia went looking for an agency willing to go too far | The Drum"