I feel like I sometimes do too much critiquing and too little suggesting. Like, somehow, I’m the 400 pound, mullet-sporting guy on his 3rd beer at the baseball game yelling at the players to run faster. So, from now on, every once in a while on a Wednesday I’ll try to balance the scales a bit and put my own ideas up for display, analysis, and critique.

Today’s Topic: Print Ads
I can’t even count how many ski and snowboarding magazines I’ve read over the years. Yet I still wonder if I have ever seen a legitimate powder turn photo in a print ad. You know the ones: faceshots, not a soul around, and blue sky. I usually have two skeptical questions when I see these ads:

• How far did you have to hike after you got off the lift to get that turn?
• What are the odds I could do the same if I came?

Quick mental calculation puts the odds of getting similar lines along the same lines of finding a winning lottery ticket in my armpit at the end of the run.

What I’d Do
First of all, many thanks to Dustin Schaefer over at Loveland for letting me use this sweet pic he recently snapped. What I’ve done with it is try to answer those two big questions with on-ad elements. By adding a little caption that points to a trail map where the picture was taken along with the date, suddenly the sweet powder shot becomes a bit more realistic. If the point of the shot is to get people excited about coming, a bit of realism could go a long way toward motivating them to visit.

I’ve tried my best to keep it simple, free from too much text, with a clear message and value that can be identified in just a few seconds.

Now, this is just a mock up. I have no idea where the pic was taken, nor when, this is simply a concept: find an awesome pic taken on a weekend, inbounds, from lift-served terrain and prove it. It will make your ad that much more believable and create a little skepticism toward other ads in the same magazine.

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.