I Went to OMA. Here’s What I Learned About Where This Industry Is Headed.

The brands paying attention aren’t buying ads. They’re buying infrastructure.

I published a piece earlier this week with data from 24 sponsorship campaigns across the Long Run Labs Network. The actual revenue numbers. The ROAS figures. What this audience does when a host they trust recommends something. If you haven’t read it, start there (link and preview coming up below); it’s the foundation for everything I’m about to say.

This week I was at Outdoor Market Alliance’s February trade show, and the conversations I had confirmed something the data had been whispering: the way brands reach this audience is shifting, and the ones paying attention are moving faster than I expected.

Here’s what I saw.

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A Coffee Brand, an Affiliate Link, and the Reporting Gap Nobody’s Filling

The most interesting conversation I had at OMA wasn’t with a shoe company or a gear brand. It was with a co-founder and the chief marketing officer of Coulée Coffee, an automated pour-over coffee company. They make the machine and the pod, both from recyclable materials with no plastic waste and no hot plastic in the brewing process. Check it out.

We ended up talking about trade shows themselves; how they used to work, and how much has changed. There was a time when written articles would be produced before the start of the second day of a show. Journalists covering the business of outdoor would file stories in near real-time, and brands could count on that coverage to amplify what was happening on the floor.

That infrastructure is largely gone. Print media in the outdoor industry isn’t what it was. The Rock Fight, which had been one of the sharper voices covering the business side of this space, has stopped producing. The result is a reporting and storytelling gap in the business of outdoor that nobody has fully stepped into yet. It’s part of why this Substack exists.

We talked about the 24 campaigns piece, and specifically the attribution problem. When I wrote that the gap between top and bottom performers almost always came down to tracking infrastructure, not performance, Coulée’s team got it immediately. Ironically, they’re already on Popfly, which has the infrastructure to make attribution work the way it should.

What happened next was the kind of thing that only happens when a conversation is genuine: they onboarded me as their first affiliate, right there on the show floor. It was useful for both of us to see what the experience looks like from both the brand side and the creator side as it happened in real time.

The coffee is excellent, by the way. You can check out the unit and coffee here.

Yes, it’s an affiliate link.

The whole thing took minutes. No contract negotiation, no six-week onboarding process. I’ve literally had partnership launches stall because an affiliate tool was too complicated, and it ruined the honeymoon (excitement) phase of the launch. That matters, because if the friction to start a partnership is low enough that it can happen in a conversation at a trade show, more partnerships will happen. Infrastructure that removes friction is infrastructure that creates deals.

On the attribution front, I’m putting my money where my mouth is. A multi-show partnership with Popfly goes live in April, which means the tracking infrastructure I wrote about earlier this week won’t just be a recommendation anymore. It’ll be built into how we operate.

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The Pattern I Kept Seeing: Consolidation of Effort

Coulée wasn’t the only brand thinking this way. Across the show, I kept hearing variations of the same idea: we don’t want to do this piecemeal anymore.

Verde Brand Communications approached me about a product seeding campaign across the network for multiple brands in their portfolio, including Roll Recovery and Jogology. Not one brand, one show, one campaign. Multiple brands, coordinated through the network, with the 24 campaigns data as the foundation for the conversation.

Buff expressed interest in product seeding across the network too. Another recovery-focused brand that’s looking to make a significant push into running sees the network infrastructure as a way to do it at scale. Outdoor Research, a brand that's trail-adjacent but interested in exploring the trail running space more seriously, talked about using the network for both awareness and market research; send product out to hosts across the network, capture real feedback from people who actually run trails, and use that input to iterate before going deeper into a category that everyone seems to be eyeing since trail running is having a moment. The network isn't just a megaphone. It's a focus group with built-in distribution.

And then there was Vibram. Vibram is an ingredient brand; their rubber is on the outsoles of shoes from Nike, Brooks, Norda, and others. They’re considering a campaign with the LRL Network not just for their own brand marketing, but as a way to support their partner brands when they launch new shoes. Think about that for a second: an ingredient brand using a podcast network to amplify the launches of the brands that use their product. That’s a use case that didn’t exist a year ago.

There are a few more conversations from OMA I'm not ready to share yet. The point isn't to name-drop. It's that the volume and variety of these conversations, across categories I wouldn't have predicted a year ago, tells me something about where the market is moving.

Each of these conversations was different in the details, but the structural ask was the same: can we use the network as a single point of coordination to reach this audience, rather than running one-off campaigns and hoping for the best?

That’s consolidation of effort. And it’s the clearest signal I’ve seen that the way brands think about podcast sponsorship in the endurance space is evolving from media buying to infrastructure.

I also spent meaningful time with reps from PR companies like OutsidePR, Verde, and dble. And I met Eric Henderson, founder of Meteorite PR here in Boulder, through Andrew Piasecki of Obviouslee, who happened to have just been telling Eric about Long Run Labs before we’d even shaken hands. That’s what a good trade show does; the right people end up in the same room, and by the time you meet, the conversation is already warm. Eric works with brands like Sweet Protection on the bike side, and we’re going to do a Long Run Labs episode together. Trade shows are often framed as product showcases, but the real value is relational. The conversations that happen between sessions, over coffee, walking the floor; those are where partnerships take shape. OMA delivered on that front.

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The Booth Problem (An Open Question)

I want to raise something I noticed on the show floor, and I’m genuinely curious whether others see it too.

Sales reps at trade show booths have a default script, and it’s almost always built around tech specs. The midsole compound. The stack height. The proprietary foam name. The carbon plate geometry. It’s detailed, it’s precise, and candidly, it’s not that interesting to most of the people hearing it.

I say this as someone who literally has a shoe review playlist called No Jargon Shoe Reviews, where I talk about the shoe, where I’d use it, the price, and whether I like it. That’s it. No foam names. No lab data. Just a person telling you if the shoe is good.

I think there’s a version of the tech spec pitch that matters. If you’re a proper journalist writing a product review, you need that information. But I’d bet the majority of people standing at a trade show booth hearing a deep dive on outsole rubber compounds don’t fully understand what’s being said to them, and there’s a massive opportunity to deliver information differently.

The brands doing it well are the ones leveraging their athletes and letting them talk about how the product works for them. One example that comes to mind is Erin Ton and Mike Wardian with Teva, facilitated by OutsidePR. Athletes telling stories about why a product matters to their training, their racing, their daily life. That’s compelling. That moves product. The spec sheet doesn’t.

Eric Henderson from Meteorite PR echoed this same sentiment at the show. He wants to hear the why behind brands and athletes. Not the spec sheet. The story. When a PR founder and a podcast network operator are independently saying the same thing, it’s worth paying attention to.

I don’t think this is a controversial take, but I also don’t think it’s consensus yet. If you're a brand or PR team, I genuinely want to know: does the tech spec script actually work for you? Hit reply and tell me. I'll share what I hear in a future piece.

Maybe some audiences genuinely want the deep technical breakdown. But I think the industry is overdue for a conversation about how we communicate product value at events like this, and whether the default script is actually serving anyone.

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A Bootstrapped Brand Launching in April

I also met the founder of Terlingua Threads, a new hemp-based outdoor apparel brand designed for extreme heat. Handcrafted in Portugal, 100% natural hemp textiles, UPF 40+ sun protection without chemical treatments, built to last like a good pair of leather boots. Their tagline is essentially: adventure apparel for 100-degree days.

What caught my attention wasn’t just the product. It was the founder’s decision to bootstrap rather than raise venture capital. He’s been on the VC side and has seen firsthand what happens when alignment isn’t there between investors and founders on desired outcomes. He chose to build this differently.

We’re going to do a Long Run Labs podcast episode to support his launch in April. This is one of the things the network does well that doesn’t show up in campaign ROAS data: helping founders tell their story to an audience that cares about how things are built, not just what they cost. The endurance community respects the long game. A bootstrapped founder building something with intention is a story this audience wants to hear.

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What This Adds Up To

Earlier this week I showed you what 24 campaigns revealed about this audience. Today I’m telling you what the brands themselves are signaling at the industry’s own trade show.

The through line is the same: the endurance audience converts, the trust model works, and the brands that build real infrastructure around reaching this audience; attribution, coordination, authentic storytelling; are the ones that will win.

The ones still buying one-off ad reads and measuring on downloads alone are going to keep wondering why the numbers don’t add up.

If you were at OMA and we didn’t connect, or if you’re reading this and thinking about what a network-level approach could look like for your brand, I’d love to hear from you. Reach out at jon@forthelong.run.

And if you found this useful, the best thing you can do is forward it to a brand manager, PR lead, or founder who’s still thinking about podcast sponsorship the old way. The conversation is changing. They should be in it.

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Jonathan Levitt is the founder of Long Run Labs Network, a 35-show podcast network in the endurance and outdoor space reaching 600,000+ monthly downloads with 900,000 unique social followers, and host of For The Long Run and Long Run Labs Podcasts. He also co-founded The Huddle, a membership community for early-stage founders in Boulder, Colorado, and virtually.