📳 Salomon's Brave New Future
PULSE/5: This is how you bring a brand platform to life
Welcome to CO/SIGNALS[PULSE] - In this quick-fire series, we highlight collabs that we’ve come across, to keep you on the pulse of brand and media partnerships.
With the backdrop of the Winter Olympics and their work to outfit the army of volunteers and organising staff (as we covered here), Salomon have launched their new brand platform - Shaping New Futures.
This isn’t a one-off campaign. It’s a long term operating system with a beautifully consistent red thread running through every component: from the hero film to documentaries, media partnerships, real-world events, and through social.
Let’s take a look…
Salomon x BBDO x Unveil x Loveboat
The hero spot, “Shaping New Futures,” is a short, punchy film that lives in an infinite white space, a metaphor for possibility and the blank canvas of what comes next. We follow a runner moving between urban and wild, tech and nature, performance and expression, while the VO reframes the future of sport as something emotional and imaginative, not just measured in seconds.
Behind the scenes, creative agency BBDO Paris, studio Unveil, and production company Loveboat blended live action with AI-generated imagery to build a surreal, shifting world that feels designed as much as it’s filmed.
Is this the best application of AI in advertising we’ve seen yet?
Crucially, the AI isn’t a gimmick here - it’s aligned with the visual language for “new realities from nothing,” mirroring the campaign’s thesis that the future is as much imagined as it is engineered.
🔗 Read more here: UNVEIL & Loveboat Unveil “New Futures” Film for Salomon
Salomon x Dazed Media
If the hero film is the promise, the Nowness documentary is the proof.
Shot at Salomon’s Annecy Design Center, filmmaker Catherine Hyland goes inside the process to show designers, engineers, and athletes collaborating in real time – testing, iterating, and literally shaping new disciplines with the Alps as their lab.
The film sits in that space between design, craft and art. The “dialogue between nature and industry” is the visual metaphor throughout, making innovation feel human, situated and grounded.
Dazed picks up the baton by spotlighting several of the creatives featured, extending the story into fashion and culture editorial.
🔗 Dazed – Mini-doc feature
Salomon x Highsnobiety
Across social, we see the work is amplified through Highsnobiety. For this campaign, they are a media partner providing scale and credibility with audiences at the intersection of fashion and culture.
Through editorial, Shaping New Futures becomes a character study. One piece zooms out on the broader platform - Salomon using its first Winter Games partnership to tell a story about volunteers, creators, and “shapers in motion,” not just medal winners.
🔗 Highsnobiety – Salomon Is Shaping New Futures
Another dives into next-gen athletes like Cole Richardson and Alisa Sidorova, treating them as multi-hyphenate creatives whose skiing is as much about expression, environment, and community, as it is about performance.
🔗 Highsnobiety – Meet the Athletes Shaping New Futures
Salomon x IRL activations in Milan
In Milan, the platform leaves the screen and hits the street.
Shaping New Futures experience
In partnership with We Are Ona, Salomon built an immersive experience that translates its innovation culture into a spatial, sensorial environment fusing design, food, and culture to make the brand feel like a host, not just a sponsor.
New Shapers Run 2026
A 10km run through Milan, positioned as a way “to engage citizens and enthusiasts in a unique experience in the spirit of the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026”.
With creators and run clubs involved, and unique perks for any Olympics volunteers taking part, there was a ton of content on socials. Here’s an example of the coverage, in partnership with Complex:
The consistent thread: the future of sport is participatory and shared - everyone becomes a “shaper” - not just pros or Olympians.
Salomon x 'Shapers'
Salomon spins the platform into a flexible storytelling format: Shapers In Motion. This pairs creators and change-makers – athletes, artists, designers, cultural voices – to explore how they’re shaping their corner of the future, on and off the mountain.
It does a few useful jobs:
Makes “Shaper” a recurring character you can return to, not a one-off tagline.
Shifts the narrative into talent-led, creator-native content that works on Instagram, TikTok, and publisher channels.
Creates a coherent structure you can drop into different cities, sports, and scenes without reinventing the format each time.
Always-On Layer with ‘Shaping The Week’
To keep the platform warm, Salomon runs Shaping The Week, a weekly news-style content series spotlighting opening ceremonies, culture moments, and community stories. It shows up in the feed, reframing the brand as an active voice on sport and culture, not just an advertiser.
This is where the platform starts to feel like an editorial lens: “Is this shaping a new future?” becomes the filter for what they post, share, and celebrate.
🔗 Shaping The Week – LinkedIn post
What this signals
Shaping New Futures is exactly how a brand platform should work in the modern age. In just three words, it says a lot about what Salomon values. Our interpretation: self determination, autonomy and responsibility to imagine, invent and innovate. Powerful.
The magic goes further than just a slogan. It provides a flexible structure to reinforce those values across a fragmented media landscape, without breaking the idea. The brand is showing us how that consistent red thread comes to life as a living ecosystem - across ads, long or short form video, events, or cultural media partners.
In particular, we give the brand top marks for stretching the platform in ways to support talent-led storytelling and community activations. From volunteers at the Winter Games, to on-the-ground run challenges, to social-first video content, the brand’s work with “shapers” is a coherent mechanism for ensuring ‘participation’ with real people is built in - not an after-thought.
As a last point, we also admire the restrained use of AI in the hero ad - it’s used with intent, and fits the purpose. Instead of being bolted on for hype, the choice serves both the narrative of imagination and possibility, and the creative direction of the work.
Shaping New Futures shows strong promise. The next evolution might be seeing how the platform stretches into more unexpected contexts - places where innovation, creativity and exploration intersect beyond sport.
For a brand built around shaping the future, it would be fascinating to see just how far that lens could stretch…
🔗 For now, go deeper with Salomon global creative director, Nick Parkinson: Why SALOMON Is Promising “the Magic of the Mountain” Wherever You Wear It
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