A push to sell spring passes became a character the community crowned. I know, because I was wearing the crown. And not much else.
The system — Character & IPA character-and-IP system: not a one-off campaign but a recurring folk hero the community adopted — nine films deep, and still theirs.
TL;DR — just show meIt started with a commercial.
The first time we saw it, we were trying to sell the spring pass — and more than that, the feeling of spring skiing: sun, slush, the umbrella bars, the last-mountain-standing swagger that Killington does better than anyone in the East. Spring skiing is leftovers — same mountain, second season, twice as good. We just hadn't given it a face.
Southern Comfort had a spot running called “Whatever's Comfortable.” A big, confident man strolls down a beach in nothing but a speedo and a pair of wingtips, drink in hand, entirely in his own world. Unbothered. Not an apology anywhere in him.
Buttery, our creative partner, took that energy and moved it to the mountain. Same absurd confidence — different weather
The same absurd confidence, but carrying a pair of old skis, in a speedo and ski boots, walking past the Roaring Brook umbrella bars like he owned the place.
Then I spent two weeks trying to find him.
Casting should have been easy. It wasn't. There's a wide gap between being a burly, confident guy and being willing to strip down to a speedo on a public mountain with the cameras rolling. One by one, they passed.
So I dropped my pants and put on the speedo myself.
Here's why, because it's the whole point. Contrast is one of the most powerful tools you have in creative work: a full winter scene, snow everywhere, everyone bundled to the eyes, and one man gloriously underdressed and completely committed, not breaking character for a second. The bit only works if whoever's in it commits all the way. Nobody else would. So I did
We shot the first video on a slow Thursday in March.
You can tell when something's working before it ever ships. People on the mountain couldn't help themselves. Phones came out. Strangers stopped to film us filming: a grown man in a speedo and ski boots carrying himself like a monarch through the snow. The reaction was happening live, in the cold, before a single frame was cut.
Saturday, I got the first edit.
Watching a video is one thing. Watching a video of yourself in nothing but a speedo, planted in the middle of a snow-filled winter scene, is another. I watched it once. I laughed.
Then I walked down the hall to the office of Rob Megnin — my boss at the time — and asked him to come to mine. I sat him down in my chair and hit play.
He made it halfway. Hit pause. Then got up and ran down the length of the building to grab Mike Solimano, the resort's president and GM.
The two of them watched it three times. Laughed at every pass. Then Mike looked up and said: can we get this out today?
That's the moment the whole thing turned on. Not the idea. The idea was Buttery's sharp read on a commercial. The moment was a president watching something genuinely risky and choosing to commit — instead of calling for a committee, a legal review, and a safer cut. We did. It was a risk. It paid off
The King of Spring didn't stay a video. He became a fixture.
Every spring after, people watched for him. Is Killington dropping a King of Spring video this year? It turned into a tradition, the kind a community starts to expect and then misses when it's late. There was a line of King of Spring shirts. People dressed as him for Halloween. I'd go on the live broadcast at the Killington Cup and hold forth as the King about my favorite season and everything the resort had coming.
And every so often I'd take laps down Superstar in full regalia and get a standing ovation from the Roaring Brook umbrella bar.
That's the part no metric catches. Somewhere along the way the bit stopped being a bit. The King wasn't a character the community tolerated. He was one they adored. Bigger than life, a little absurd, unapologetically theirs. Polarizing, sure. Not everyone's thing. But the people he was for didn't just get the joke. They showed up for him, stood up for him, put him on their own backs
Then the numbers agreed with the community.
I'll be straight about the era. Organic reach on Facebook in 2016 was a different world, and anyone who knows social knows it. That's not a knock on the number. It's why the number was reachable, and the point holds: a spring-pass video starring a guy in a speedo pulled six-figure organic reach because the community carried it, not because a media budget pushed it. They shared it because he was theirs.
And spring itself, the season this was built to sell, turned from the soft, cuttable, why-bother stretch of the calendar into a profit center people planned trips around.
The King got featured in POWDER Magazine, in 4241, and in more social mentions than I could count. And he never fully retired. He still makes the occasional surprise appearance, a decade on and through two changes in ownership. Not a campaign anyone schedules anymore. Just a character the mountain won't quite let go of, resurfacing now and then to the people who crowned him
They didn't just watch him. They posed with him, dressed like him, wore the shirt off-mountain, wrote him onto a ballot. A spring-pass character pulled six-figure organic reach because the community carried it, not because a media budget pushed it. They shared it because he was theirs
“Give whoever did this video a raise.”
Ryan C.
“Long live The King!”
Harry G.
“A strong argument for boxers over briefs.”
Tim G.
“Reportedly, skiers are calling for DNA testing.”
Gary G.
“Is that Brock Lesnar's little brother?? haha”
Christopher R.
“My new favorite ski resort.”
Steve F.
“Sexy. Love the mullet.”
Chris T.
“Wtf did I just watch.”
Nick L.
“My poor eyes.”
Jeffrey P.
“Brilliant!”
Alicia A.
“If only we gnarred that hard.”
Nick H.
👑
Robert F. · Top fan
You can brief a vision. Or you can put it on your own body and take the laps.
The King of Spring ran the same method the Beast reclaim ran: take the thing everyone else wrote off, read what the community actually wanted from it, and commit hard enough to make them believe. The Beast proved it on positioning. The King proved it on revenue, and on something harder than revenue. Adoption. A season the market forgot became a season people crowned. It stopped being leftovers. It became an identity.
You can architect all of it. But sometimes, first, somebody has to drop his pants and commit to the bit
It taught me a brand can become a character people adopt as their own — and that loosening my grip is what made it theirs. I learned to build something bigger than my control of it.