Less about the slopes.
More about what you become on them.
How Ski Le Gap — the world's first gap year ski & snowboard instructor school — reclaimed its #1 market position by rebuilding the performance engine and repositioning the brand to own the gap year.
Increase in high-intent search presence
More efficient Meta brand awareness delivery
Fewer missed opportunities due to stronger ad performance
Thirty seasons of firsts.
Ski Le Gap was the first in the world to do this.
Since 1994, they've been running gap year ski and snowboard instructor courses at Mont Tremblant, Quebec — the #1 ski resort in Eastern North America — training over 3,000 students across 30 seasons.
Their product has never really been a certification. It's a season that changes who you are: instructor training, yes, but also a winter of independence, friendships, and confidence that stays long after the snow melts.
The problem? None of that was coming through in how they showed up — and the market position they'd invented was being contested by newer players.
A category creator, blending in.
The paid account was working against itself. Everything — every course, every audience, every message — ran through one single campaign. There was no conversion tracking and no goals, so the account was optimising for the only thing it could see: clicks. Budget flowed to wherever clicks were cheapest, not to where bookings came from.
The brand was selling like everyone else. The messaging focused on selling ski courses — features, dates, prices — in a market where every competitor says exactly the same thing. For the company that invented the category, that meant competing on someone else's terms.
The result: missed demand, rising costs, and a #1 position slipping away.
Brand × Performance. Together.
The performance rebuild made every pound accountable. The brand repositioning gave those pounds something worth saying.
Restructured the account into campaign verticals
We broke the single catch-all campaign into distinct verticals — ski courses, gap year, and brand — each with its own audience, message, and budget. Structure follows strategy: spend could finally follow the buyer, not the click.
Built conversion tracking & goals from zero
The previous build had no tracking at all. We implemented full conversion tracking and goal structures, so the account stopped optimising for clicks and started learning from actual buyers. You can't optimise what you can't measure.
Repositioned the brand to own the gap year
With our brand partner Thumbcorp, Ski Le Gap stopped selling courses and started owning the category. The creative was rebuilt around a new idea — “Play. Learn. Teach.” — reframing the offer from ski training into something bigger: a life experience that lasts a lifetime.
Every competitor sells courses. Only one brand can own the gap year. Making the story about who you become — not what you book — moved Ski Le Gap out of a price-and-features fight and back into the position they invented.
Play. Learn. Teach.
The idea that repositioned a category creator
#1 market status. Reclaimed.
With the structure fixed, the tracking honest, and the brand saying something worth hearing, the numbers followed — fast. Near-total visibility across the searches that define the category, a stronger presence wherever high-intent buyers are looking, and the category creator back where it belongs.
Brand ambition — "own the gap year" — made measurable by performance structure. That's what Brand × Performance looks like when it lands.
Want a growth story of your own?
Most agencies do brand or performance. We do both, together.