OUR WORK

Saddleback Mountain ‘23-’24 Ski Season Campaign

  • Going into the 23/24 season the team knew that in order to continue the success of the prior year, every marketing decision needed to be anchored in data to intelligently expand and refine the existing media strategy that capitalized on positive weather events, but allowed enough flexibility to adjust to poor weather conditions.

  • We developed a media plan that consisted of a comprehensive broadcast and digital approach, with advertising activations spanning across 34 platforms and vendors. The centerpiece of the media plan were category-exclusive Storm Day sponsorships with placements across all priority-market broadcast TV affiliates (e.g. NBC, ABC, CBS and FOX). Supporting platforms included out-of-home, radio, Spotify, Hulu, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, paid search, local sports sponsorships, email, direct mail and billboards.

    The media placements were fully-integrated with the ”Maine’s Favorite Mountain” campaign message through close collaboration with the Saddleback team and their creative partners, Words from the Woods and Maine Mountain Media. Every execution, regardless of channel, was customized to ensure the messaging translated from the brand and creative platform, to execution-specific campaign assets that accounted for the specific preferences, and behaviors, of each platform’s users.

  • The 23/24 weather was one for the record books, and not in a good way. Statistics showed that the ‘23-’24 winter season was Maine’s second warmest winter on record, and the snowpack was ranked seventh-lowest since the data started being collected 84 years prior.

    Despite these challenges — the team’s adaptability, creativity, and perseverance paid off with Saddleback accomplishing many significant milestones, including: all-time-highs in total average ticket price, single day skier visitation, and overall season revenue.

Live + Work Maine x Maine Department of Education

  • In collaboration with Live + Work Maine and the Department of Education, Fan Out Media spearheaded a targeted campaign aimed at drawing educators to Maine. The mission was clear: find the best avenues to reach a niche audience of teachers that would be open to relocating to Maine. 

  • Utilizing extensive demographic research, we identified key educator personas and strategically deployed a robust multi-channel advertising campaign. With the goal of reaching early career educators and urban education majors, we selected platforms to ensure we could reach the target audience across media regularly consumed during commutes. We categorized channels into four distinct themes – “The Subway”, “The Street”, “The Earbuds” and “The Phone” – to ensure we could execute on our surround-sound strategy that targeted the morning commute.

    To cover “The Subway”, we used out-of-home transit placements along subway lines in New York City and Boston that services colleges and K-12 institutions. For “The Street”, we secured mobile LED billboards, driven by professional brand ambassadors that covered custom routes between school zones during the AM and PM commute, with the mid-day spent on college campuses. To reach the target audience through “The Earbuds”, we ran streaming audio through Spotify with audio ads appearing in commercial breaks between music and podcasts. For “The Phone”, we ran a combination of video, digital and text ads across Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Hulu, YouTube, Reddit and paid search. All of the creative for this campaign was done by Maine based agency, Anchour.

    While the primary target markets were Boston and New York City, we were willing to expand to national targeting for specific placements when the placement was both high-impact, and the media was laser targeted.  For example, we secured a full page ad in the National Education Association’s quarterly publication, NEA Today, which reaches the personal mailboxes of over 2.3 million teachers.

  • Overall, the campaign garnered 40.3M impressions, and generated 69.4K link clicks. By the end of 2023, 59,700 new users have visited the Teach In Maine landing page. By spreading out and engaging our desired audience from different angles, this campaign was hugely successful in conveying the essence of Maine as a desirable destination for educators, and tapping into an audience where that message could resonate and inspire.