Ski Utah

In June of 2020, faced with travel restrictions and guidelines during the pandemic, Love Communications was tasked with developing new creative assets and overseeing an omni- channel advertising campaign that promoted Utah’s ski industry assets. They are a major economic driver, generating $1.322B in total visitor spending during the 2017-2018 season. Ski Utah is a key partner in promoting the state’s ski season and the various resorts, outfitters, guides, lodges and local businesses who comprise the industry.

Identifying personas through research

Love Communications collaborated closely with Ski Utah and their partners to develop a portfolio of creative assets that allowed the campaign to be nimble and flexible, with multiple variation options to test. We then exercised various relationships with digital partners in the programmatic, native, and pre-roll spaces. Perhaps most importantly, all advertising channels were informed by a constant feed of consumer confidence data paired with search intent analysis and audience research, providing regular data-driven updates to key ski- industry leaders about consumer confidence and behaviors nationwide.

Based off of on-mountain surveys completed the prior ski season, five unique ‘personas’ were developed from this research with creative elements tailored for each group to ensure messages were resonating based on each segment’s unique behaviors and demographics. The assets utilized were a multi-channel blend of display banners, native advertising units, and pre-roll spots across the various audience segments, wherein this audience-based approach to targeting resulted in above- benchmark performance metrics across the campaign.

Demonstrated ROI

The lynchpin measurement piece of our efforts with Ski Utah were driving bookings to hotel properties in the state of Utah. This is the primary end-to-end measurement solution and can ultimately be seen as the core conversion action for the campaign. The new audience targeting approach and media mix generated over 10.9 million dollars in revenue for the first two months of the campaign, across more than 27,000 hotel bookings. The Average Daily Rate of these booking was $140, which was 12% higher than the benchmark we generally observe.