Narrowcasting — a new strategy for travel organizations to reach digital travelers
By Anijo Mathew
Founder and Chief Experience Officer/Vamonde + Academic Director of the Ed Kaplan Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship/IllinoisTech Chicago
When my daughter was four years old, she picked up a book, turned to a page with pictures and did something which still amazes me to this day. She used the pinch and zoom gesture on the picture, looked at me in bewilderment when it did not change, and said “Papa, this is broken.” To a 4-year-old in 2014, a basic requirement of media was that it should respond to her. Otherwise, it appeared broken. I narrate this incident to my students to describe the changing relationship we have with media and how traditional media artifacts may no longer be relevant to the next generation of audiences.
In the 1960s, the famous media theorist, Marshall McLuhan published several essays on media and its effects on education. The problem, McLuhan says, is that our model of education is based on the technology of the printed word (McLuhan 1964/2003) which dictates that information is scarce and must be ordered and generic to reach a wide range of audiences. In other words, the model of information exchange that we use today is built on the idea of broadcast — a book once printed, a TV segment once produced, or a news show once broadcast, transfers the same information to everyone who engages with it.
What is broadcasting?
Broadcasting is a distribution mechanism by which the same information is compressed and signaled to a large group of people such that the information retains its original state, and everyone consumes the same information at all times. The best example of broadcast technology is the printed book. Broadcast is great because it provides efficiencies at scale and significant cost reductions in terms of curation, production, and transference.
However, hidden in the printed book, is also a problem. Once printed, information contained in the book is very difficult to change (without considerable time and effort). It stays the same whether you read it or me, no matter how much more you know about the topic than I do. It stays the same if you read it in Chicago, USA or Jaipur, India, no matter if one city is closer to the information than the other. It stays the same, whether you read it today or 100 years from now, no matter if new events have altered the narrative over time.
So powerful is the idea of broadcast, that it has become the de facto standard when we think of any form of information exchange. Even with new digital technology — websites, YouTube, Twitter, we, for the most part, still follow the rules of broadcast. In travel, tourism organizations and cultural institutions use broadcast as a primary mode of communication to their constituents. Their dissemination channels often still include printed maps, brochures, books, and static websites. All of these engage a broadcast strategy — a generic set of information is transferred to the broadest audiences. However, travel is seeing a massive shift in the type of audiences that consume content.
In a previous article, I described the emergence of a new breed of travelers that we call digitally savvy explorers. This group is defined by one characteristic behavior: they are so accustomed to reactive content that they seldom pick up a book or a map when they arrive at a new place. Instead, they turn to their phones to look for interactive content that appeals to specific interests and needs. They want to participate, not just consume. Because interactive and responsive content is not readily available, they scrape the internet to look for other sources. This, in turn, creates a problem of credibility — local experts, Wikipedia, travel bloggers, even review sites such as Yelp are emerging as new sources of authority even though they are very different and often inferior to traditional authority sources such as museums, cultural institutions, and travel organizations.
So, what can organizations do? I founded Vamonde to specifically address this issue. Vamonde empowers organizations to narrowcast — a type of casting model which caters to individual preferences and demands allowing organizations to take existing content, modify it slightly, and make it more relevant to this group of travelers.
What is narrowcasting?
Narrowcasting, a word used mostly in information networking systems, is a distribution mechanism where information is compressed and disseminated to a comparatively small audience defined by special interest, geographical location, or a specific handicap. Different groups may receive slightly modified versions of the same information. Think of local news channels on TV; the hypothesis is that depending on your location, you may be interested in very specific aspects of news that may not appeal to others in different geographic or interest areas.
This is important because it caters to the digitally savvy explorer’s need for interactive content designed specifically for him or her. An example for cultural institutions could be a writer’s museum that uses the same digital content on their website and on a mobile platform. Except when you are standing in front of the home of a famous author, the platform recognizes this and serves up additional content specifically connected to that home — photos of what that house looked like when the author lived there, or what the interiors look like today, or video interviews with neighbors who lived in the houses nearby.
There are three types of narrowcasting strategies:
Unicasting
Unicasting is a mechanism where information is disseminated from one source to one receiver. The information is encoded or packaged in such a way that only that source and that receiver can exchange it. Its relevance may also be limited to this group of two — a sort of secret message with very personal information that only the sender and receiver can understand.
Example: A hotel may look at a high profile guest’s loyalty card data to understand that she is Chinese and is particularly interested in Chinese art. Vamonde can guide the guest to Chinese art experiences in the city curated by a local museum and presented in Mandarin. To the guest, this information not only appears magical, it also reinforces brand loyalty to both the hotel as well as the museum.
Multicasting
Multicasting is like unicasting, except in this case the information is disseminated to a small group of people with a specific requirement, interest, or handicap. Like unicasting, multicast information may include very specific syntax and semantics that only this group can understand or appreciate.
Example: A grandparent, a teenager, and 8-year-old visiting the zoo are looking for three different experiences. Zoos know this, but since physical artifacts such as in-place signage make this difficult to do, they seldom change their tactics. On Vamonde, however, the same stop — say a polar bear enclosure — might present three different narratives, each with its own tone of voice, graphics, images, and text to cater to each of these folks. One could be designed to appeal to older visitors (the grandparent learns about how the caretaker maintains and feeds the polar bears), another to young adults (the teenager learns about the zoo’s conservation efforts to preserve diminishing polar bear populations), and the last one appeals to young children (the polar bears talk to the 8-year-old and tell her stories about how they got to the zoo from the poles).
Anycasting
Unlike the other casting mechanisms, anycasting is a little complicated. For our discussion, we will focus on one type where the information starts off as a broadcast, but once a receiver receives that information, they can modify it and rebroadcast it. This “new modified” version of the information is available to everyone now. The next receiver can modify it again, and so on and so on. At any given moment, the information you are seeing is specific only to that context and time, an accrued upon version of the original, and you consume it with the knowledge that it may change the next time you return to it.
Example: An art museum creates a mural adventure on Vamonde where existing digital content is connected to mural locations in the city. Using anycasting models, “local experts” that visit that location are encouraged to add new relevant content (“do you know the person who painted this mural,” “did you live in this neighborhood when the mural went up?”). Information posted by local experts must be approved by the curator but once approved, it gets added on top of the existing content. Thus, the experience never remains static. Patrons may see a whole new set of information every time they return to the mural location, some of which may come from people they know.
As you can see, these new types of casting methods are significantly different from broadcasting. Broadcast worked great when new casting methods were expensive and inaccessible. We need to recognize that our technological capacities have changed; we know that today’s travelers are introduced to digital media at a relatively young age and spends more time engaging with digital media at throughout their travel journey. This is why narrowcasting strategies must be serious contenders for travel organizations as they try to reach this audience. If organizations do not evolve to appeal to this aspect of her relationship with information, travelers will move on. They knows they can find it elsewhere. The source may be less credible, but the information is definitely more interesting.
