Who Wants to Go On a Trip?
MARKETING LESSONS FROM 16 LOCAL BUSINESSES
You may know that when we're not busy writing The Brief, we get to spend a lot of our time consulting in the tourism industry, as well as in retail and tech. What's not to love about working in tourism? We all like to travel, the people are amazing, and there's so many great stories to tell that the possibilities for marketing ideas are endless.
Over the last few years, the tourism industry may have been one of the hardest hit, so when Destination BC called us to help small businesses across the province, we jumped at the chance. The project was called Power Up, and it paired various experts with businesses in order to give them the tools they need to thrive this year, and into the future.
We were paired with 16 organizations that ranged from wineries to museums to campgrounds and everything in between. Of course we had a great time working with each one of them, but we also learned a ton in the process.
Rather than keep all of that knowledge to ourselves, we've published an article on our site for everyone to read. Whether you work in tourism & hospitality, or you just love to travel and want to know how you can support your favourite local businesses, there's something in there for everyone.
And in other news, TikTok is Taking on 10 Minute Videos!
There's an odd phenomenon that social platforms have created – whether it's 140 characters, a single square image, or 6-second videos, creativity seems to be borne out of constraint. We love to mess with the format, to find ways to jam as much meaning as possible into small spaces and produce things that the original platform may have never imagined.
The flip-side is that, when you remove the constraints, people feel uncomfortable. Remember when Twitter expanded from 140 to 280 characters? The Internet shouted that this would be the end of the platform, although there was no rule that said that any of us couldn't self-impose the 140-character limit back onto ourselves.
The same thing is now happening at TikTok, but instead of a doubling of the character count, in just over a year they've increased the maximum video runtime from one to ten minutes (they increased from 1 to 3 minutes in 2021).
What appears to be implied from the TikTok announcement is that they're going to be investing more heavily in tools and distribution that more closely resemble something like YouTube, but in the meantime, the creators are very concerned about what this might mean for their process. In a tweet, creator @HunteryHarris cleverly summed up the concerns: "10 minutes is a damn tedtok"
Written by Conner Galway, Junction Consulting