The chills of winter have started to blow into certain parts of the U.S., and in certain of those parts that means ski season is here or not far off. Skiers being who they are, affluent and educated and leisure-time spenders, they make ideal targets for advertisers, and the slopes make surprisingly effective venues for their messages.
Traditionally, that meant reaching skiers with static signage and sampling in lodge rooms and elsewhere, but as in so many other areas of alternative media, there are a lot of new opportunities these days with the rise of digital signage.
To find out how to get your client’s message on and around the ski slopes, read on.
This is one in a Media Life series on buying the new out-of-home venues. They appear weekly.
Fast Facts
What
Advertising to skiers at ski resorts.
Who
Various companies offer advertising options at ski resorts. For this article Media Life looked at Sitour USA in Kingston, N.Y., and Brand Connections in New York.
How it works
Ski resorts are attractive to marketers because of their inherently affluent visitors. Most buys run through the season, which typically lasts from Thanksgiving to Easter. Buyers have a range of options as to where their ads are seen.
Print posters can be put up in lodge lobbies.
Outdoors, ad messages appear in areas where people stack their skis and snowboards during breaks. Skiers oftentimes remember where they put their gear by recalling the ad on the rack.
Another option is ads on the trail maps that skiers find throughout the resort, where they stand for a minute or two as they decide which run to try.
Yet another option for marketers is setting up tents to offer skiers product sampling. Tylenol recently ran a campaign targeted at women in which male masseurs offered their services in heated tents while the women relaxed with hot chocolate.
But the emerging platform is digital signs, and they are popping up inside and outside of ski resorts with a mix of ads and ski information.
These new digital networks can run static, animated or video advertising, and ads can be swapped with the flick of a few switches. Advertisers can target by area of the resort and time of day as well.
Markets
Advertisers can target any market that has ski resorts, from New England to the Rockies in the West and all points in between where snow falls on slopes, and typically they'll buy 50 to 60 resorts.
Advertisers can also target by gender and even by age, for example targeting snowboard parks to reach younger skiers.
Numbers
Last season the industry attracted 60.5 million skier visits nationally, a new record, according to the NSAA study.
How it is measured
Advertisers are provided tallies of lodge visitors and lift ticket counts to calculate total impressions.
What product categories do well
Auto, financial, insurance, food, pharmaceuticals, health/beauty products, entertainment, travel, leisure, rental cars and credit cards are frequent advertisers.
Demographics
Skiers tend to be an active and affluent bunch, with 45 percent reporting household incomes of $100,000 or more, according to a study from the National Sporting Goods Association.
They also tend to be young: People 44 and under make up about 80 percent of skiers, according to a 2008 study by the National Ski Areas Association. But skiers are getting older. A decade ago, 14.0 percent were 45 or over. That figure has risen to just under 20 percent.
Making the buy
Sitour USA: Manages an ad network spanning some 1,500 ski areas worldwide and 225 in North America. On average, static signage costs about $2,300 per position for the entire season, while ads on 25 LED screens costs about $98,000 for the season.
Brand Connections: Manages a network spanning 120 resorts across the country. CPMs run in the $4 range, and a typical advertiser might spend $175,000 to $300,000 over a season
Who’s already advertising at ski lodges
Chevrolet, Lipton, Tylenol, Hertz, Budget, Dannon, Aleve, Visa, Alka-Seltzer, Dove and the U.S. ski team.
What they’re saying
“It’s not necessarily about reaching skiers but more about reaching active people who are skiing in the winter because there’s not much else for them to do. The mountains in the summer attract nearly as many active people, because they also hike and mountain bike.” – Brian Martin, founder and CEO of Brand Connections.
Web site info
Sitour USA
http://www.sitourusa.com
Brand Connections
http://brandconnections.com
