What comes after the most successful project of your career?
We made the best-ever ad campaign for Utah. Now what?
Picking yourself up after a failure is hard work and everyone knows it. Well-meaning fathers everywhere tell you to keep your chin up. Pinterest memes with chalkboard script over photos of sunsets remind you that the only real failure is no longer trying.
I’ve failed a lot in my life and the feeling never stops sucking. I have learned though, how to ride out the feelings and continue on despite them. What’s much more intimidating for me is how to carry on after a tremendous success. Where do you go after creating the most successful tourism advertising in the history of the world?
It’s not really, by the way — the most successful of all time, I mean. But as far as our client, The Utah Office of Tourism, is concerned, the Mighty 5® campaign promoting Utah’s five national parks was a total game changer. Strategic Marketing and Research Insights (SMARInsights) reported that last year, the ad campaign produced an ROI of $338 dollars in tourism revenue for every dollar spent on the campaign. That’s an insane number. Not so many years ago a SMARInsights survey found that potential travelers didn't’ even know where Utah was. They thought imagery of iconic Utah red rock was actually Arizona, and thought the mountainous Salt Lake City skyline was Colorado. Today, potential travelers know Utah for what (and where) it is and call our home state “life changing” and “spectacularly gorgeous.”
The campaign has been so successful, that it would be tempting to keep running it forever. For my creative team, as well as for our intelligent client, the perceived risk of failure seems much weightier after this soaring success. But we’re all disciplined enough to know that it’s better to leave the party early than to wait until all the lights come on and the guests are yawning into their sleeves.
So, our challenge this past year has been how to harness the equity built by the Mighty 5, but evolve the narrative beyond just national parks, to share the love with all the beautiful red rock country of Southern Utah. I’d been dreading the process, carrying around the weight of potential failure for months. When the time came, to get ourselves in the right space (literally), a team of writers, art directors, designers and strategists and I road tripped to the vibrant desert surrounding Moab, Utah.
Hiking under those immense skies with such imaginative colleagues, my fear of ruining our past success began to evaporate in the dry air. Infinite possibility was on horizon. Pulitzer Prize-winning Utah writer, Wallace Stegner, called the West “the native home of hope.” This thought became central to our creative concepts, as well as to my own state of mind. We tossed around ideas as we walked, and at night, papered the walls of our rental condo with Post-It® notes. By the time we drove home, our socks stained red from desert sand, the story of the new campaign was beginning to crystalize.
Here’s that story:
Whether you live in a high rise on the east coast, or a suburban house on the west coast. Whether you drive to work on a mid-western freeway or have never set foot above the Mason-Dixon line, when you close your eyes and dream of a road trip through the American West, you’re picturing the landscapes of Southern Utah. They’re a part of you. They’re your birthright.
No landscapes are more fundamentally American — wild, open and free, breathtakingly beautiful and full of hope — than those of Southern Utah. The Mighty 5 national parks, the equally majestic state parks, and the untold nameless vistas seen along the road. Traveling The Road to Mighty through Southern Utah is an essential American story that’s more about the journey than any single destination. And tapping into this birthright connects you to a national legacy of artists, visionaries and adventurers who have all done the same.
The Road to Mighty ad campaign rolled out to a select spot market audience this spring, and will go nationwide in 2017. We all have every hope for its tremendous success.
See you on the road, because as Stegner wrote “the road has always led West.”
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