The other day I was chatting with a co-worker about numbers.

As marketers, we see hundreds of numbers a day. Open rates, reach, ad spend, click rates, revenue, budget, pageviews, sessions, brand awareness, followers, subscribers, conversion, this list could go on and on…and on.

But what’s often missing from these numbers is they why and what: why should I care, what should I do about it.

Jackson Hole’s Big Stat
If you ski from the top of Casper Bowl at Jackson Hole to the base area, you’ll log right around 3,300′ of vertical. That’s one of those numbers that, like conversion or click rates, doesn’t mean a whole lot and leaves the reader asking why should I care.

Now there are a few things Jackson Hole could do here to answer that question:

• They could add more numbers: i.e., acreage that covers, snowfall it sees each season, lifts that service the area
• They could add more copy: “some of the most incredible, diverse skiing on the deepest snow in the West”
• They could add a visual: maybe a trail map with this area highlighted or an aerial photo

But they didn’t wrap any of these things around the number 3,300. Instead, this did this:

Not bad, eh? Blake Paul is riding like I do about 30 seconds before I wake up. That combination of conditions and terrain and style is gold.

But, my snowboarding daydreams aside, I want you to think about this from one more angle.

Stats -> Content
Because on the one hand, maybe Jackson Hole did just as we suggested: they started with a really strong stat they wanted to promote that was central to their brand and then created some great content to wrap around it.

Content -> Stat
But there’s also a great chance they did they opposite: they created some amazing content and found stats that helped support and connect the narrative. These incredible conditions weren’t highlights from the day, they were clips from a single, top-to-bottom run.

Both Work
The bottom line is this: both of these approaches work because great edits alone don’t tell the story any more than great stats.

A number tells one piece of the story and a video tells another. Combined, however, the build on each other to give the viewer extra reasons to care and answers to the why and what.

Great work, Jackson Hole.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.