A year and a half ago, Signal Snowboards started producing a monthly video series called “Every Third Thursday.” Simply put, they create some random, unique board for the fun of it (you likely won’t be seeing a Guitarboard, Legoboard, or Golfboard in your local boardshop anytime soon) and produce a video of the adventure. Each video snags anywhere from 10,000 views on the low end, to 240k+ for episodes like the iPad board.

It’s a simple idea, tons of fun for those involved, and gets their brand ridiculous amounts of exposure. When they debuted the iPad board I mentioned earlier, they went to Loveland (240k views), when they built the Paintball boards they went to Timberline (55k views), the Boombox board was tested at Bear Mountain (40k views). My question to you is:

What resorts are they going to go to this year and what are you going to do about it?

The most recent episode (Fish Out of Water snow/surf board) was filmed at Baldface in Nelson, BC where the lodge even got to do a little shoutout about what they’ve got going on. It may take nothing more than calling up Signal and saying, “Hey, we love what you guys are doing, what can we do to get you guys out here for your next ETT board test?”

The Next Level
The real trick, rather than just partner with someone that is doing cool stuff, if coming up with your own cool, viral-ish videos that reflect your brand and spread like Every Third Thursday does. Memes are constantly coming and going which means that one option is simply to capitalize on those trends and they flow like Whistler/Blackcomb did to the tune of nearly a million views:

The bigger option is the be the creator, the instigator, the manufacturer of a trendy series that spreads across Twitter and Facebook like a disease (the good kind).

The Good, The Better, The…
So far, the industry has seen a few successful concepts. Halley O’Brien had a solid series going at Mountain Creek called Rapid Play (their channel has 670k views, mostly from Rapid Play) and Whistler/Blackcomb’s “Embedded” project snagged nearly 200,000 views. More than snow porn, more than park updates, it takes a little something extra to break through the clutter and get picked up by major outlets.

Greg Wright from Freeskier, in regards to Embedded, said:

“We want more of this. More good content. And good content doesn’t need to be produced by Brain Farm shot from a helicopter on a RED camera. Each of these videos will be shot by one person, edited at night and turned around by the next morning. Every resort out there can afford to do this. And every resort out there has a story to tell. Give us that, and we will endorse it.”

Signal tells a story about a board and a brand in every movie the make. I think we’re yet to see best videos are yet to come for the ski industry. Can’t wait to see what resort hits the next home run.

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.