Utah Office of Tourism's The Mighty Five campaign, created by Struck in 2013, united five national parks under one brand and drove 375,000 additional visits in
ARCHIVEHow Utah Office of Tourism Made The Mighty Five a National Parks Icon
The Mighty Five is a 2013 state tourism campaign created by Salt Lake City agency Struck for the Utah Office of Tourism, uniting five distinct national parks — Arches, Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, and Zion — under a single, monumental brand identity distributed across television, digital outdoor, wallscapes, online, magazine, and social media channels across seven western United States markets.
The campaign launched on March 27 and 28, 2013, according to Business Utah Gov, with a reported budget of $3.1 million, as cited by both business.utah.gov and ksl.com. Its central objective was to transform Utah's red-rock landscape from a collection of individually marketed destinations into one cohesive, culturally resonant proposition capable of competing for the attention of leisure travellers across the American West. Rather than promoting each park in isolation, the Utah Office of Tourism and Struck made a deliberate strategic bet: that naming and branding the five parks as a unified group would generate the kind of recall and desire that individual park promotions had never achieved.
Television advertising ran across Los Angeles, Denver, Phoenix, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle, per business.utah.gov, while outdoor placements extended to Las Vegas as well, according to ksl.com. The campaign's Film medium asset anchored the entire platform, delivering a cinematic sweep of Utah's canyon country that gave the collective its name and its visual authority. In the United States, where state tourism offices compete intensely for discretionary travel spend, The Mighty Five represented an unusually bold act of brand consolidation. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 74 out of 100, reflecting its strong strategic clarity, proven audience reach, and award-winning creative execution.
ARCHIVEStruck identified a fundamental problem in Utah's tourism positioning. Each of the five national parks — Arches, Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, and Zion — carried its own identity, its own visitor base, and its own promotional history, yet none had achieved the top-of-mind cultural status among western travellers that rivals such as the Grand Canyon in Arizona or Yellowstone across the Wyoming and Montana border had long enjoyed. The strategic insight was that consolidation, not differentiation, was the path to competitive relevance.
The campaign's target geography was deliberate. The seven western markets, anchored by Los Angeles and San Francisco, represented high-volume origin points for leisure road trips into Utah's canyon country, and they were markets where competitors such as the Colorado Tourism Office and Travel Nevada were already active with significant media investment. By concentrating spend across these markets simultaneously, the Utah Office of Tourism could achieve a density of impression that individual park promotions could never sustain on the same budget.
The broader travel and leisure environment in 2013 provided favourable conditions. International tourist arrivals reached approximately 1.035 billion in 2012, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization, and in the first half of 2013 arrivals were growing at roughly five percent year over year, per UNWTO data. Within the United States, domestic leisure travel was recovering with momentum, and state tourism budgets were under pressure to demonstrate measurable returns. The Mighty Five was designed from the outset to be accountable: a named brand with named parks, trackable media, and defined target markets. As reported by ksl.com, the campaign's $3.1 million investment was structured to generate verifiable visitation lift, not simply awareness.
The Mighty Five's creative execution rested on a deceptively simple premise. Alexandra Fuller, associate creative director at Struck during the campaign's development, described the concept to outsideonline.com as laughably simple — a name and a number, applied to five of the most visually extraordinary landscapes in the United States. That simplicity was a creative choice of genuine discipline, requiring the film and design work to carry the full weight of the brand's ambition.
Director Ryan Gibb helmed the film production, bringing a landscape cinematography sensibility to footage of Arches, Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, and Zion that prioritised scale, light, and geological drama over human lifestyle depictions. The decision to lead with the land rather than the visitor was consistent with the campaign's positioning logic: these were not parks to be sampled, they were monuments to be encountered. Executive creative director Steve Driggs oversaw the campaign's overall creative direction at Struck, with art direction by Phil Smallwood and copywriting and editing by Garrett Martin. Producer Stevie Meier managed production, while account director Jeremy Chase and account manager Kelly McClelland led the client relationship.
Across its media mix — television, digital outdoor, wallscapes, online placements, magazine, and social — the campaign maintained a consistent visual grammar of deep reds, vast skies, and geological abstraction that made The Mighty Five immediately recognisable across formats. In outdoor placements across San Francisco, Denver, and Las Vegas, the wallscapes translated the film's cinematic scale into static formats without losing the campaign's sense of grandeur. The name itself functioned as a headline, a hashtag, and a navigational device, giving travellers in the United States a phrase to search, share, and repeat.
The Mighty Five produced documented, source-attributed results that placed it among the more accountable state tourism campaigns of its era in the United States. According to business.utah.gov, the campaign reached 5.75 million people in its first year. Campaign-attributed visits between March and December 2013 totalled 375,000 additional visits, as reported by business.utah.gov, representing a measurable and attributable lift in physical arrivals to Utah's national parks corridor.
The reported return on investment figure was $126 for every dollar invested, according to business.utah.gov — a metric that, if accurate as stated, positioned The Mighty Five as an exceptionally efficient deployment of a $3.1 million state tourism budget. Estimated annual additional visits over the three years following launch reached 500,000, per business.utah.gov, suggesting that the campaign's brand consolidation strategy produced durable behavioural change rather than a single-season spike.
The campaign's industry recognition reinforced its effectiveness credentials. On October 15, 2014, the Utah Office of Tourism and Struck received the highest award from the National Council of State Tourism Directors at the Mercury Awards, as reported by sltrib.com — the tourism marketing sector's most prominent United States honour. The Mighty Five also established a platform lineage, complementing Utah's established winter brand, The Greatest Snow on Earth, and creating a year-round positioning architecture for the state, according to ksl.com. No single campaign metric defines its success more clearly than its persistence: The Mighty Five remains in active use as Utah's national parks brand identity more than a decade after its 2013 launch.
The Mighty Five is a 2013 Utah Office of Tourism campaign created by Struck that branded five national parks — Arches, Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, and Zion — as a single destination. It launched on March 27 and 28, 2013, with a reported budget of $3.1 million, according to business.utah.gov, targeting seven western United States markets.
The Mighty Five features Arches, Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, and Zion national parks. The campaign united these five distinct Utah parks under one brand identity, replacing individual park promotions with a consolidated platform designed to build collective recognition among leisure travellers across the United States, according to business.utah.gov and ksl.com.
The Mighty Five generated 375,000 additional visits to Utah between March and December 2013, according to business.utah.gov. The campaign reached 5.75 million people in its first year, also per business.utah.gov, and estimated annual additional visits over three years post-launch reached 500,000, demonstrating sustained visitation growth beyond the initial campaign period.
The Mighty Five won the highest award from the National Council of State Tourism Directors at the Mercury Awards on October 15, 2014, as reported by sltrib.com. The Mercury Awards represent the most prominent United States recognition in state tourism marketing, and the win affirmed the campaign's creative and strategic effectiveness on a national industry stage.
Struck, a Salt Lake City advertising agency, created The Mighty Five for the Utah Office of Tourism. Key credits include director Ryan Gibb, executive creative director Steve Driggs, associate creative director Alexandra Fuller, art director Phil Smallwood, and copywriter and editor Garrett Martin, with production overseen by producer Stevie Meier.
The Mighty Five reported a return of $126 for every dollar invested, according to business.utah.gov. The campaign operated on a $3.1 million budget, also per business.utah.gov, making that ROI figure one of the most cited performance metrics for a United States state tourism campaign from the 2013 period, if confirmed by independent audit.
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