Whistler’s 50th anniversary video is both well crafted and well marketed.

Too often I’m seeing incredibly made videos fall into the “if we build it, they will come” mentality. Once published, they’re tweeted, shared, and that’s about it.

With Whistler, however, they’re doing some really, really smart stuff to build and maintain viewership and value from this content.

#1) Home Page Real Estate
Right off the bat, the video gets a nice little slot right on the home page. We all know how much traffic the root page of our domain gets and Whistler is making sure this crowd knows about it.

#2) Dedicated Landing Page
After that, the video gets it’s very own landing page with tons of supporting info (which I’ll talk about more in a minute)> This isn’t just a stock page, it’s custom made for the vid.

#3) Interactive Timeline
One of the best elements on this page is, without a doubt, the timeline. They’re telling a story, after all, and this interactive element helps the user go back and relive each step along the way. The weather element and height of the page makes it a bit harder to consume than it could have been, but still amazing.

#4) Email Partnership
Within a week of launching the vid this email landed in my inbox from Snowboarding. Dedicated to the campaign and latching onto the strong snowboard theme throughout the story, this visibly boosted view counts and shares.

#5) The Rest
It’s hard to sum this up with a simple screenshot, but I’ve been impressed by two things with this rollout in general.

1. How many places I’m seeing the movie (it helps that brand videos are fast becoming the fuel for online media outlets)
2. How spread out the coverage has been in terms of time

For example, I was traveling when the video came out and, had it been any other rollout, I probably would have missed it. But here it is showing up in my feed, inbox, etc. a week and a half after the launch.

That may sound strange to think of 10 days as a long time, but I assure you it’s rather rare often at no fault of the resorts. It’s simply the fast-moving river of online media that we have to fight against to give evergreen content a bit of a shelf life.

Awesome Work
But all in all, I’ve been super impressed. The video is incredibly well made, the marketing has been stellar (as usual), and the effects will last for months and years to come.

Great work from all involved.

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.