I watched the timeline light up the night Alex Honnold climbed Taipei 101. Everyone was talking about Netflix, the live stream, the no-ropes spectacle, the 10-second delay in case it went wrong. Or the breath-taking one-hand hanging mode. And the read was almost unanimous: huge win for Netflix, all the attention to Netflix.

It probably was. But the moment I kept thinking about wasn't the climb. Is it only Netflix who wins here? Any other brands got better awareness?

What actually happened on Taipei 101?

In January 2026, Honnold became the first person to free solo Taipei 101 — no rope, no harness, no net — in roughly 91 minutes, streamed live on Netflix as "Skyscraper Live."

The numbers were big. The event pulled over 6.2 million views and around 12 million viewing hours globally, and in a single week the building generated more than 125,000 mentions and over 15 million engagements. Taiwan's president thanked him for putting the country on the world stage. For one night, a skyscraper became the most-watched object on the internet.

So far, this is the story everyone told. A platform, a stunt, a spike in attention.

Didn't Netflix win this one?

Yes but only on its own scoreboard, and that scoreboard is short. Netflix wanted a live, buzzy, talked-about event to prove it can do live entertainment. It got exactly that, for one weekend.

Here's the thing about platform wins like this. They're real, but they're perishable. The views happen, the clips circulate, the trending tab moves on. A live event is an enormous spike with a short tail. By the following week, the algorithm is feeding people something else, and Netflix has to go find the next spectacle to do it again.

That's the assumption worth poking at that the company hosting the moment is automatically the one who got the most out of it.

So who actually got the better deal?

The North Face. Honnold has been their athlete for years, and they spent close to nothing extra to be attached to the biggest climbing moment of the year.

Think about the cost structure. Netflix reportedly paid for the production, the access, the talent, a serious bill. The North Face paid for none of that. Their ";;cost";; was a relationship they already had and were already paying for. When Honnold's moment went global, the brand he's been tied to for a decade rode along for free. Even better, they'd opened a store inside Taipei 101 the previous spring, so the building he climbed already had their name in it.

Why "owning the moment" is the wrong scoreboard

Most brands chase ownership. Be the title sponsor, get the logo on screen, buy the placement. But ownership of a moment is expensive and temporary. Association with a person is cheaper and durable.

Why does an ambassador beat an ad here?

Because an ad ends when you stop paying, and an ambassador keeps working long after the event does. This is the part people miss when they picture sponsorship as "logo on screen."

The value of Honnold to The North Face isn't the few seconds his shirt was visible during the live feed. It's that he is a walking, permanent association the brand carries 365 days a year. He hosts a climbing podcast. He shows up on talk shows and sports shows. He does press, festivals, his own documentaries. Every one of those touchpoints quietly renews the same connection — credible, hardcore, outdoors — without a media buy attached.

A campaign is something you rent. An ambassador, done right, is something you compound. The Taipei climb didn't create the North Face association. It amplified one that was already running in the background, and that's exactly why it was so cheap for them and so valuable.

Wait wasn't it North Face exclusively?

No, and this is where the simple version of the story falls apart. The single most-covered gear detail wasn't the jacket — it was his shoes. He climbed in La Sportiva TC Pros, and he's an ambassador for them too. His watch even got its own round of commentary online.

So the honest read is that several brands in Honnold's roster won that day, not one. But there's still a clear hierarchy, and it's worth understanding why The North Face sits at the top of it. Shoes get a news cycle "what shoes did he wear" is a one-week search spike. The North Face relationship is deeper, older, and tied to identity, not a product spec. They dressed him at the Oscars. They put a store in the building. That's not a placement, that's positioning.

The lesson isn't "be the only brand on the athlete." It's "be the brand the athlete is associated with as a person, not just the one whose product showed up."

What did the moment actually move?

It moved association, reach, and shelf-life, the three things that are hardest to buy directly. The North Face got tens of millions of impressions wrapped around a story of human courage, attached to a man the public already trusts, at a fraction of what a comparable ad campaign would cost.

And the part that keeps paying: the post-event media tour. Honnold didn't go quiet after he topped out. He kept doing interviews, panels, and appearances — and every time he's introduced as "the climber who free-soloed Taipei 101," the brand association comes along for the ride. The event was a single night. The earned media around it is still running months later, and the ambassador relationship will outlast all of it.

So what should fintech and healthcare and other brands take from this?

Stop thinking in campaigns and start thinking in associations — because in trust-heavy industries, who is permanently linked to your brand matters more than what you ran last quarter.

This is where it gets relevant for the businesses we work with. In fintech and regulated markets, the instinct is usually to buy attention: a big launch, a sponsored event, a burst of performance spend. All of that spikes and fades, exactly like the Netflix side of this story. The thing that actually moves trust is durable association — a credible person, partner, or institution consistently tied to your name over time.

A few translations:

A one-off influencer post is the "ad." A long-term, genuinely aligned ambassador is the "Honnold." For a broker or a bank, a credible figure who shows up repeatedly tied to your brand builds far more trust than a single paid burst — and trust is the entire game in regulated finance.
For healthcare, the same logic holds harder. A respected practitioner or patient advocate associated with you over years builds a kind of credibility no single campaign can rent. Trust there is slow to earn and instant to lose, which makes durable association the only thing that really compounds.
The cost insight matters most. The North Face's biggest win came from a relationship it was already paying for. The question for your brand isn't "what big moment can we buy?" It's "who are we already associated with that we're under-using?" Most companies are sitting on relationships — partners, clients, founders, internal experts — that they treat as background instead of as ambassadors.

Honnold climbed for Netflix. But the brand that had quietly invested in him, years before anyone knew this climb would happen, is the one still collecting. The spectacle was the event. The association was the strategy. And only one of those is still working today.

The real question this leaves on the table: are you buying moments, or building associations that keep paying after the moment is gone?