Brand
Vail Resorts - with Droga5
Time
07/2018 - Current
Roles
Creative Direction | Copywriting | Art Direction | Branding
The Who/What/Why
In the fall of 2021, I was contracted by Droga5 to work on a project for Vail Properties, who owns 20+ ski resorts and mountains around North America. The ask was a full rebrand for each of Vail Resort’s (VR) “Rockies+” catalog of mountains. These included the eponymous Vail Mountain, Breckenridge (or colloquially just “Breck”), and McCoy Park, a new terrain addition to Beaver Creek.
Vail Mountain | Published Work
The video below, “Vail, You Just Let Go”, was the lead video in the brief for Vail Mountain. I worked with the Copy Director at Droga5 at together we led the concepting and wrote the script. The video currently is sitting at 1.7million views on YouTube.
McCoy Park - Beaver Creek | Published Work
McCoy Park - Beaver Creek | Branding Directions 1 & 2 and Creative Executions
Vail Mountain | Video Campaign Direction 1
Vail Mountain | Video Campaign 2
Breckenridge | Rebrand Directions 1 & 2
Breckenridge | Rebrand Direction 2
The work that made it! Below you’ll find the only work from this entire project that made it through the gauntlet. As you can see from the below images, the campaign headline/core message that the client ran with was “Explore More, Together”. You can also see further down, that this was one of the two branding concepts that was pitched.
Included in this section: Top-Left - Hero Image from Beaver Creek’s website, Right - Full screenshot of Beaver Creek’s landing page, 2nd down from Top Left - McCoy Park launch video with campaign tagline, 3rd down from Top Left - Terrain Map with campaign tagline, Bottom Left - Tile Card with McCoy Park description (repeated across Beaver Creek website as well as Vail Properties umbrella site)
A little bit of work that made it and a little bit that didn’t. In this section you’ll find two creative directions for McCoy Park’s new branding and example executions for both directions. Based on the previous section, you can guess which one made it.
The first item on the docket and first request made by Vail Properties (the client) were creative directions for a video ad campaign that would, along with social media, would lead the charge in Vail’s eventual rebrand. The client also requested we do our best to leverage stock/existing footage from their DAM.
The ask for Breck was the largest: Come up with an entirely new brand persona and campaign for Breckenridge Ski Resort. Breck is one of the most popular mountains in Vail Properties collection. It’s also the one with the strongest reputation. It has a (bit of a) reputation for partying and ‘bro’ culture. With this rebrand Vail Properties wanted to shed Breck of the negative aspects of it’s identity and refocus on the characteristics that made Breck such a unique experience, to make it accessible for a wider audience. To identify those characteristics we focused on Breck’s Five Peaks combined with the village—5 distinct peaks and a mountain town, providing a range experiences for varying skill levels, aka a lot of something for the whole family, regardless of your skill level.