I first met Al White in 2013 at a Colorado Association of Ski Towns (CAST) meeting at the Colorado Municipal League in Denver. Mayors from the state’s most notable ski towns were gathered to discuss current affairs that affected their respected slopes, and buzzed around one man in particular, making me wonder, who is that? Today I am sitting across from him at his desk in his downtown office, about to have lunch, and this time his attention is mine, and there is not a mayor in sight.
If images of carving through powder among vast expanses of Rocky Mountain peaks or hiking through alpine meadows dotted with wildflowers are the pools of ink from which your first memories of the colorful state were drawn; White is the man who holds the pen to those powerful images.
Once ski-shop owner, come Colorado state Senator, White is director of the Colorado Tourism Office (CTO). He has created impressions that have stuck with us so vividly that Colorado is now not only a bucket list place to visit, but the hottest place in the country to live. White is a man with a plan, a marketing plan, which has been successfully employed for nearly a decade.
The CTO’s efforts to draw people to Colorado are working. I ask White how he’s captured these original visitors, and what’s their motivation behind coming to stay permanently? “Some people would suggest we’re just fortunate and riding the coattails of an improving economy,” said White. “I’d say that’s not the case.”
For the past three years, the CTO has implemented the Come to Life campaign to promote Colorado tourism, which despite having a lengthy shelf life for today’s rapidfire marketing strategy, is working. “The whole Come to Life concept is aimed at getting people to realize their day-to-day world is O.K. Its pays the bills, but until they come to Colorado and realize the potential of what their life can be, they’re just kind of existing. When you come to Colorado, you come to life.”
White came to life from Illinois over 40 years ago when he was just eighteen years old. “I got on a train with my great aunt and uncle in St. Louis for a spring break vacation in Colorado. I had never skied before. We over-nighted on the train, arriving at Union Station in the morning. We continued through the Moffat tunnel on the Yampa Valley Mail train and by the time we got to Winter Park, there was five feet of snow on the ground. I looked out at Byers Peak on one side, and the Continental Divide on the other. The color blue was a shade I’d never seen before. It reached me emotionally. It is that emotional feeling that I try to put forward in the Come to Life campaign.”
After falling in love with Colorado, White and his wife moved to Winter Park and worked in the ski business for 25 years; however they were not strangers to challenging times. “By 2000 we were down to one store, trying to cherry pick our business that was the most profitable, which happened to be the shop at the base of the Mary Jane Mountain. The ski area came in and said they were going to take over our space, and we lost the business value of what we created. I felt; there’s got to be a law about something like this.”
Sentiment, not a typical reason for a launch into politics, is what jumpstarted White’s.
In 2000, White served as a Republican member of the Colorado House of Representatives for eight years before being elected to the Colorado Senate in 2008. In 2010, then governor-elect John Hickenlooper crossed party lines to appoint White to the helm of the Colorado Tourism Office, a challenging position due to the organization’s aggravated past.
The CTO did not always brandish the peppy red, white, blue and yellow flag with the same vigor it does today. At the organization’s infancy, legislators imposed a sunset review on the CTO, giving the organization five years of funding, before deciding if they would reauthorize more. Two sunset reviews later, it was 1992, the same year the TABOR law passed, stating that any tax that was imposed on citizens had to be approved by citizens. In 1993, the citizens of Colorado voted against the tax required to continue funding, and the CTO went dark. With that vote, “Colorado lost one third of the national overnight market share,” said White.
In 2000, the CTO was reinstated, with an annual budget of $5 million, a number that will increase to $19 million next year, with a goal to specifically target the international markets whose citizens typically stay longer and spend more. Even with the budget increase, funds are still minimal compared to states like Florida and California, both of which expend upwards of $100 million in marketing annually.
Colorado’s marketing platform keeps up with its coastal counterparts, despite its significantly lower budget, because “the heart of our campaign is that Colorado will reach you at an emotional level. What we do doesn’t work in California. It doesn’t work in Florida. It is a fact of life that once people visit, they want to come back,” said White. And he has proof. Over his desk, White hands me a copy of Bon Appétit Magazine, showing off the diverse outlets in which the Come to Life campaign is featured and explains how 82% of CEO’s that are based in Colorado originally came on vacation.
I want to know, however, with all the people moving to Colorado, how White will continue to market and preserve the image of Colorado that everybody fell in love with in the first place?
“When I first came to legislature in 2000, some ideas we were fighting were urban sprawl and unregulated growth. Me trying to tell the story of tourism fell on deaf ears,” said White. “To preserve the place we fell in love with in the first place, we have to keep ourselves sustainable, which we’re doing with resources like the Bureau of Land Management and federal and state land and parks. As desirable as it is now, I think people will continue to come to Colorado. “
Inspiring people for a living is hard work, but with a canvas like the state of Colorado, and the diligent and dedicated marketing strategy that continues to foster growth in the state, White has ensured that even if not everyone comes to stay, everyone at least comes to visit.