New Places, New Stories
Content-driven travel adventures are born when technology links up with the age-old art of the storyteller
Content-driven travel adventures are born when technology links up with the age-old art of the storyteller
If you’re a frequent business traveler, you probably know what it’s like to fly to a city, to walk the streets, eat at a popular restaurant, sleep at a famous hotel, and still feel like you’ve never truly visited the city at all. With very little idle time in a full work schedule, it can often be difficult to soak up the culture of a city, or to have an experience that will give you something authentic to take home.
For business travelers seeking these intellectual souvenirs, it can be incredibly frustrating. There’s just not enough time to immerse yourself in any meaningful way.
While there are a number of terrific apps that will help you navigate the best hotel, the best restaurant, and so on, there are very few for the accidental business-tourist to quickly capture some perspective. From simple walking guides to detailed maps and interesting factoids, there’s still an underlying dimension – a“vibe”– of every city that’s hard to discern for the short-time visitor. It’s the stuff that only locals come to know about their environs: the stories, lore, the history, and the context of a neighborhood that sometimes takes years to understand.
This type of experiential and intellectual treasure is locked up in every city, but it hasn’t been until recently, with advances in technologies like Bluetooth, iBeacon, and the onset of the wearable revolution, that such content has been liberated from the walls of museums, libraries, historic sites, places of interest, galleries and studios – and pushed out into the neighboring parks and streets. There it’s been brought to life for a new and sometimes unsuspecting audience of the professional business traveler turned amateur cultural anthropologist.
The arts and cultural communities in many large metropolitan areas are embracing these technologies and are now using them to animate their exhibits, ushering in a new generation of contentdriven travel experiences for everyday travelers.
Didactic to Socratic
No, this is nothing like your father’s travel content, not even close. This is more storytelling wrapped up in technology, using a variety of new techniques to construct an enriched experience that’s intended to leave a more serendipitous and indelible impression.
What was once a simple black-andwhite, Didactic experience has gone Socratic, and is now being offered in ultra high-definition.Your navigation prompts the questions and technology delivers the answers. Travelers are brought much closer to the people, places, and things which surround them – and they’re able to see them from an entirely new and engaging perspective.
Take for example an exhibit that launched earlier this year, in April (through Sept. 15), by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in NewYork that spotlights the work of Jacob Lawrence, one of the most important artists of the 20th century – and a Harlem native.
As a companion to its exhibit, MoMA launched a self-guided audio tour of Harlem which chaperones smartphone users through key Harlem landmarks and institutions from the 1930’s and 40’s, the period during which Lawrence began his career as an artist. The storytellers behind the tour stitched together actual audio of Jacob Lawrence, interviews with key cultural leaders who contribute to Harlem’s cultural vibrancy today, and on-location recording and writing to offer a site-specific narrative that captures Lawrence’s story.
And late last year, at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, a storytelling experience unlike any other was unveiled. Here the museum introduced the first-ever integration of Google Glass technology into a major art museum exhibition. The tour provided museum goers with auxiliary images, audio and video relevant to select works of art.
Walking through the exhibit, as you look at the work of NewYork activist-artist Keith
Haring, you hear the sounds of subway trains, blended with eyewitness accounts of those who saw the artist work in the subway. Further into the tour, you can watch a clip from a CBS newsreel showing transit police arriving and arresting the artist. Imagine walking right out the door of FAMSF into the streets, only to continue the tour and the experience.
Weaving the Tapestry
All of these advancements in storytelling are also important to the business of travel. As destination marketing becomes more and more competitive, good stories – and good storytelling – can help travelers to build deeper connections with places and the people that live there. And that can be a valuable driver of repeat tourism.
Hurried, harried business travelers aren’t the only ones who appreciate a good story, well told, about local culture. The story will resonate with any visitor, or even long-time residents, especially when it’s authentic, as seen through the eyes of the actual characters that have lived the experience, or that continue to do so today. From the perspective of“bragging rights,”it’s fair to say that a great, unique and personal touring experience has equal, if not better status than securing a table at one of those you-have-to-know-somebody restaurants you can never get into.
Bryan Smith, an award-winning filmmaker from British Columbia recently told Destination Marketing Association International in an interview that,“Exploration is about uncovering something new, so a destination looking to appeal to the sense of exploration is simply looking at ways to creatively present the uniqueness of a place. But the catch is that it has to be presented in a way that sparks curiosity. People have to be lured into a place to feel a sense of exploration. If they think they know what it is all about, then it does not feel exotic or new.”
While user generated content is everywhere in travel today – and it serves as an important resource for the nomadic types – it rarely tells us a story. Everyone has a cell phone and can shoot video footage. Everyone has a Facebook account and can post images and comment about their experience.
But there’s a creative art in storytelling – the audio, the visuals, the characterization, the narrative – that weaves these elements together to provide that sense of exploration, and that spark, that can immerse someone in their travel experience.
A number of today’s travelers rely heavily on the recommendations, ratings, and opinions from peers and like-minded travelers. In fact, a number of them won’t even commit to a hotel, restaurant or an attraction without consulting a resource like TripAdvisor first.
However, there is no TripAdvisor for culture – at least not yet.You can’t review a conversation with a character from the neighborhood. There’s no guideline for finding someone to share some local flavor with you.You’ll have to rely on a great storyteller to bring that to you and experience it for yourself.
Perhaps you are that storyteller. Have you heard any good stories lately? BT
Dave Falter is the president and CEO of Antenna International, a provider of technology, content and managed services to the world’s artistic, historic and cultural institutions.