At the VidCon Asia Summit in Singapore in December, Jeremy Jauncey, CEO and founder of Beautiful Destinations, spoke about the pressure tourism organizations are under to embrace digital, the role of social media content creators in travel marketing and the importance of maintaining a focus on sustainability.
Beautiful Destinations began as an Instagram account in 2012, publishing visually captivating travel photos from around the world. In 2014, having generated a multimillion-strong following, it evolved into a creative agency that produces "digital first" content for travel brands and tourism boards worldwide.
“When we started, the focus was to help tourism boards and brands build social communities and understand how to use digital and social … it has now grown into a strategy, marketing and consulting company that helps them with branding, content and understand marketing positioning… and tourism master planning as well,” says Jauncey.
Operating a team of approximately 50 people out of its head office in New York (with team members spread across London, Hong Kong and Manila), the company has worked on high-profile tourism board partnerships like Egypt, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, the United States and Jamaica.
“Those markets are ahead of the curve. … When you look at Abu Dhabi tourism or Dubai tourism, when you look at their infrastructure they have highly professionalized marketing and strategy teams. They’re able to recruit some of the best people from all over the world to come work with them and very, very competent marketing leaders.”
However, younger and more nascent tourism destinations are thinking ahead, leapfrogging traditional media and making a beeline for digital.
Earlier-stage destinations are completely skipping the more traditional media start and going straight into digital and social and catching up.
Jeremy Jauncey - Beautiful Destinations
Says Jauncey, “Earlier-stage destinations are completely skipping the more traditional media start and going straight into digital and social and catching up … particularly in Southeast Asia.”
He identifies Singapore as a leader in the space, particularly for drawing connections between Singapore Tourism Board, the Economic Development Board and its leading media companies. “The whole destination brand has been born from tourism, investment and media.”
Jauncey describes the synergies between different organizations as evidence of a more exciting shift in the world’s attitude that travel is “not a soft industry … tourism is the tip of the spear that brings people to your country and tourists are only one product. You have foreign direct investors who understand now the value of a country - its stability, infrastructure, people and culture. All of those things play a really big role.”
Challenges still remain for many established travel companies and DMOs who may struggle to break away from working within a traditional agency framework. He explains that advertising campaigns did not have the same impact they once did as consumer attention spans shorten, putting pressure on brands to sustain constant touch points.
“In reality now, it’s constant pieces of content and you need teams who can create for all manners of platforms. … You need to tap into a creative community that helps them to create that content and get that word out.”
Beyond publishing content, companies must also be wary about what data points are worth tracking and which metrics are most appropriate when assessing a campaign, beyond likes, tags and comments.
“We’re seeing the most progressive leaders in tourism are taking content that is successful from an engagement standpoint from digital and social, and moving it into paid advertising. … There is a fairly high likelihood that when that content is run as a paid ad, it will convert higher.”
Focus on content creators over influencers
Brands still grapple with how to work effectively with digital content creators, particularly influencers who have garnered a fairly negative reputation over the years.
Jauncey was careful to distinguish between the terms “influencer” and “content creator,” arguing that an influencer is always front-of-camera promoting their personalities as a product and some can “face creative challenges in delivering value.”
Meanwhile content creators span a broader range of creative types, from photographers and videographers, editors, producers and directors “that have skills that they just happen to distribute on digital and social platforms.”
Working with a platform like Beautiful Destinations can be a channel for many of these creators to amplify their skillset and build their reputations to a much larger audience. The company works with both sides of the spectrum depending on their target audience.
“We’ve been in the space so long, we know how to evaluate what kind of value [influencers] might be able to bring. But we do work much more with content creators with a much smaller following but brilliant [content].”
When scouting creators, the company assesses them across a variety of metrics, including visual style and their ability to follow Beautiful Destinations’ brand guidelines, as well as puts them through a series of competency tests like how they respond to a brief, edit and shoot their content. It currently has approximately 250 freelancers in its extended network.
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While DMOs, OTAs, hotel brands and the like can afford services provided by Beautiful Destinations, Jauncey argues there is still plenty of opportunity for smaller, independent businesses to harness digital using their own resources.
“The biggest thing is to ‘upskill’ … all of us started from a lack of knowledge. None of us knew this inherently and this new media space, you can absolutely learn,” says Jauncey. “The most innovative people who are really pushing the envelope taught themselves … we built this community by teaching ourselves. If you don’t have the resources to get someone to pay to do it for you, you can teach yourself.”
Sustainability in travel is about spreading out
Having cultivated one of the largest tourism communities in the world (approximately 25 million total, across platforms), Beautiful Destinations has a tremendous responsibility to protect the very destinations it promotes.
The company’s brand ethos is that travel is a force for good and that it is a universal language that can connect communities with one another. The ethos guides the type of content showcased on its platforms, storytelling about sustainability and causes that matter. It aims to encourage people to “travel in a way that respects and understands the environment.”
However, it is arguable that on a digital platform like Instagram, where content is so snackable, many consumers may miss this underlying message and focus primarily on a destination’s aesthetic beauty. While people are becoming increasingly aware of their impact when they travel, it is difficult to draw a connection between a beautiful image and its sustainability consciousness.
Jauncey argues that one way is to “highlight destinations that desperately need tourism and really need the economic development that would come if people go there. … We are looking for undiscovered destinations that have the ability to handle tourism, and the dispersal of tourism dollars helps the economy too.”
It facilitates the drive outward from top-ranking tourism destinations like Venice and Barcelona to second- and third-tier cities that may be just as, if not more, beautiful but do not garner the same level of attention from travelers.
“[The top travel destinations] were built in a tourism era when nobody cared about sustainability. … Now, with these new places, we are getting in front of governments and saying, ‘When you develop that next [destination], you better make sure it’s sustainable and that the hoteliers adhere to strong sustainability guidelines and that X percentage of the natural environment is protected’,” says Jauncey. “We have an amazing opportunity to build new tourism experiences that are rooted in sustainability.”
Yet when you couple that with the complexity of geopolitics and issues surrounding corruption and politicians who are not truly incentivized to protect the destinations they are attempting to develop, will outside pressure truly be enough? Is tourism enough of a force for good to stimulate real change?
“The alternative is not to [try]. … We can’t stop arguing and fighting for it. There is a social conscience in our generation [and there] is a disconnect between the people who run the world and the people that will inherit it … slowly but surely we are seeing younger leaders being given opportunities to take on leadership roles and those are the ones who will have the responsibility to make that change.”
*This article originally appeared on WebInTravel.