The crew at Origin were approached by Tourism Whistler last year with an request backed by a powerful insight:

“People come to Whistler not because they spend hours online researching the best place to ski, or even because they are tempted with a great package deal. The #1 reason people chose Whistler as their vacation destination was because someone they trusted told them to.”

After much brainstorming, they ended up with a site that aggregated and organized all the photos people were taking in Whistler and sharing through Instagram. in effect, putting the voices of all their brand ambassadors in one place and letting them tell the Whistler story instead of the brand itself. In their words:

“An anthology of unofficial, uncensored, candid snapshots and moments curated from one single winter in Whistler. There is no official filter. No Photoshop applied. No staging or set ups. Its Whistler, through the people’s lens. One winter’s worth of perspectives and moments and memories in one place.”

Here’s the intro video:

The fully responsive site has thousands upon thousands of photos laid out in slick boards around topics like Anticipation, Rooftop of the World, Dropping In, and Snow Play.

According to make sure that visitors to Whistler knew to use the hashtag, Origin’s Andy Bethune said,

“In terms of in-resort promotion, we’ve created a few different collateral pieces including banners that hang from some of the walkways and bridges in the village [image below], and Tourism Whistler also had posters placed around the resort. We also created stickers and some cool tearable magnets that consisted of a mosaic of images that could be torn apart to create lots of little image magnets”

To date, over 13,000 photos have been aggregated around this hashtag.

User generated content, all in one place, with a strong offline presence to drive usage and viewers. While we don’t know how a friend (or many non-friends aggregated like this example) sharing pictures of their vacation compares to one-to-one word of mouth in terms of influence (which was the basis for the idea), this is still a very solid campaign.

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.