It is easy to get swept away by the sights, sounds, and tastes of a new place. The challenge is figuring out a way to make others feel the same excitement of traveling through a video. That’s where Contiki comes in.
Contiki’s videos aim to capture the essence of any destination. The company finds unique vloggers to travel on their trips, experience various cultures, and tell their personal story of the trip.
With their Travel Project videos, the brand is hoping to personalize travel and show how various influencers weave the traveling experiences into their lives and into the context of the broader world.
We caught up with Ginny Copestake, the Chief Marketing Officer for the Contiki Marketing Lab, to dig deeper into the Travel Project and the ideas behind it.
What is the approach and goal of the Travel Project? How does it interact with the larger Contiki brand as a whole?
Ginny Copestake: The Travel Project is our influencer program, and the umbrella under which all of Contiki’s influencer activity lives. It is a visual and editorial storytelling project, created to help our travelers connect with the wider world on a deeper, more personal level.
The program allows us to show how travel isn’t a topic that lives in isolation, but is connected to real life issues and conversations [about sustainability, mental health, sexuality and culture] in a multitude of ways.
Who is the target audience for your digital content?
GC: Our core target audience is our 18-35 demographic – the age range of our Contiki trips – but through the topics we explore and influencers we work with, we’re also speaking to Gen Z’s aged 16-18.
What trends do you see in how and where people travel?
GC: Young travelers don’t want to go somewhere just to tick it off a list, they want cultural immersion, personal connections, and a wealth of memories. They want to meet ‘real’ people – locals who can share and impart wisdom, allowing them to do something others haven’t done – partly for the experience, and partly for the bragging rights.
A few years ago this was Iceland; this year, the likes of Israel, Jordan and Sri Lanka are hot topics. Young travelers are politically active, outspoken on injustice – they know they have a voice, and they want to use it for good. They don’t want to be just purveyors of culture, they want something more tangible than that – they want to see it, feel it, taste it, experience it, and leave feeling changed by it.
What is your selection process like when choosing videos to feature on the site? Are you involved in the development of the video itself or do you just curate them?
GC: The content created for The Travel Project is a mix of in-house work, and content created by influencers. In both cases, we identify the story we want to tell, and then seek out an influencer/partner to help us tell it. In regards to content created by influencers, we share with them the story we want to tell and the reasons why, but then give them creative freedom to create content that works best for their audience.
