Mobile > Technology
PERFORMANCE ART, Toronto / BLACK & ABROAD / 2022
Overview
Credits
Background
BLACK & ABROAD AT HOME
Black & Abroad is among the world’s most prominent niche-audience travel brands. Known for its international trips to Latin America, Europe and Africa – and its provocative “Go Back To Africa” campaign – global shifts in the travel industry created an opportunity to focus on domestic travel. With Black-owned businesses disproportionately affected by the pandemic (McKinsey), and the brand’s audience at the center of a retraumatizing conversation about systemic racism, we also saw an opportunity to provide uplifting ways for travellers to interact directly with America’s vast network of Black-owned businesses and cultural organizations.
BRIEF
Activate Black & Abroad as an emerging domestic travel brand with an uplifting, tech-forward engagement platform.
OBJECTIVES
Build the brand’s domestic travel credentials.
Stimulate interest in Black-centered domestic travel.
Create a cultural counterpoint to Black pain narratives.
Describe the creative idea
INSIGHT
When marginalized communities navigate the world, they're asked to do so using tools that prioritize someone else’s worldview. Change the tools, and you could change the experience.
THE BLACK ELEVATION MAP
An uplifting domestic travel utility for Black & Abroad that visualizes Black cultural data as elevation. The greater the density of data, the higher the elevation.
See the heights of the culture at BlackElevationMap.com
CREATIVITY ON A CONTINUUM
This project sits on a historical continuum of Black-led design and “counter-mapping” – a map-making practice interested in charting Black geographies at times when barriers to owning your space (disappropriation) could be as elusive as barriers to owning your body (slavery, lynching, incarceration).
DATA VISUALIZATION
At the center, a visualization of +330,000,000 points of data, which through exploration reveals insights about population distribution, and where Black-owned businesses and cultural institutions are likely to be present, absent, and in what abundance.
Describe the strategy
PRIORITIZING SELF-IDENTIFICATION
The data gathering process considered scale, quality, accessibility across all 50 states, ethical sourcing and race-based bias. We prioritized data from sources where users self-report their own ethnicity.
ELEMENTS OF ELEVATION
Google My Business API
Yelp! API
2020 Decennial United States Census XML
Historical Markers Database API
NASADEM natural topography
BLACK TRAVEL SOCIAL FEED
The map also contains a feed that pulls in Black travel-related social media conversations from Twitter and Instagram based on hashtag use.
THREE AUDIENCES:
Modern Black Travelers.
Black-owned businesses and institutions.
Allies.
MOBILE TRAVEL UTILITY
Since its launch in February, 79% of all of visitors to BlackElevationMap.com have arrived on mobile devices. They can geo-locate to find points of interest in their immediate vicinity, connect directly to Google Map’s routing and directions, and experience the map’s full, immersive 3D experience on the platform it was designed for, enabled by the site’s robust WebGl implementation.
Describe the execution
VISUALIZING THE HEIGHTS
The project is a crafted patchwork of interwoven data and technologies:
NATURAL ELEVATION
A straight port of a global Digital Elevation Model (DEM) called NASADEM.
TOTAL & BLACK POPULATIONS
Derived from a custom choropleth monochromatic visualization that uses census tract polygonal data for geographical units. Densities computed and visualized using quantile (equal count) categorization.
BLACK-OWNED BUSINESSES
Elevation generated using an ad hoc point density visualization.
HMDB
Data tagged “African-American” pulled from the Historical Marker Database. Visualization generated as above.
POINTS OF INTEREST
CMS content and records from HMDB, combined with API data from Yelp! and Google, filtered for relevance to travel. Google Places ID used for standardization across sources. Rules for clustering and visibility by zoom level.
3D OVERLAY
Mapbox GL web library with a custom WebGL renderer, wrapped in a custom React web app.
SEARCH
Results from Mapbox service integrated to prioritize and differentiate project-specific records.
List the results
BRAND BUILDING
116% brand lift (*Facebook Brand Lift Study)
647% greater campaign awareness than benchmark
45.4 MM impressions across paid and earned channels
BUSINESS DRIVING
302% increase in traffic to BlackAndAbroad.com
360% increase in unique visitors
971% increase in event sales and site merch
AD PERFORMANCE
6x the average 2022 monthly YouTube campaign view rate
+116% increase in ad recall, compared to control
33% beyond Facebook and Insta category benchmark for campaign awareness
293% exceeded benchmarks for key traffic clickthrough rate from digital media
DATA PERFORMANCE
+330,000,000 total points of data
+47,000,000 Black population data
+28,000 Black-owned businesses listed
+6,500 cultural markers
+1,500 social sources across 53 embedded data feeds
INDUSTRY IMPACT
This project continues the brand’s industry leadership in connecting sophisticated cultural ideas with sophisticated technological execution.
PR
“Turning heads and garnering plenty of attention online.” – Condé Nast Traveller
“The Black Excellence Visual We've Needed” – Travel Noir
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