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 – the brand saw an opportunity responding to global shifts in the tourism industry by shifting 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 travelers 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.

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.

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.

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).

THREE AUDIENCES

1. Modern Black travelers: this millennial audience is the brand’s target, customer and the primary intended user of the map.

2. Black-owned businesses and institutions: Black & Abroad views supporting other Black-owned businesses as necessary and rewarding.

3. Allies: Anyone who appreciates The Culture.

TARGETING

We ran two separate audience profiles, at two different phases of the launch:

1. Interest and signal-based lookalikes – a baseline audience built on interest and travel-intent behaviour (e.g., search) that expanded in real time to people who “looked like” those who engaged most.

2. High-Value Audience – an audience designed by Kinesso, based on academic trend research into Black culture, race-based data bias work, and leveraging the Acxiom data spine.

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.

BACKGROUND

A Black Travel Movement began in 2015 when a growing number of social media and branded communities were created to address the unique desires of Black travelers, who were largely being ignored even as their economic value increased from $49 billion (2010) to $109 billion (2019).

Black & Abroad was one of these trailblazing communities and grew into a multi-platform travel and lifestyle company, providing curated experiences catering to the Black community with tours focused on African, European, and South American destinations.

Unfortunately, COVID-19 led to a collapse in the travel industry. In 2022, as travel opened back up, Black & Abroad wanted to re-ignite conversation about Black travel and yearned to develop a follow-up to their globally recognized “Go Back to Africa” campaign with something equally as provocative. With Black-owned businesses disproportionately affected by the pandemic (McKinsey), we saw an opportunity to turn our attention to domestic travel and support Black-owned businesses at home.

CREATIVE CHALLENGE

“Maps are not ideologically neutral location guides. Mapmakers choose what to include and exclude, and how to display information to users. These decisions can have far-reaching consequences.” — “How Black cartographers put racism on the map of America” by Alderman & Inwood

As we began to explore how to tell a domestic story for Black & Abroad, we started with the idea of creating a map utility that would feature Black-owned businesses, which would be relatively straightforward to build. But through our discovery, we recognized a disturbing cultural truth about maps that would shape how we approached the project.

From redlining to modern urban planning, maps have been used to marginalize, divide, and oppress Black communities across the United States and around the world. We decided to create a wayfinding experience that would bias the data in the Black community’s favor, one that would sit on the historical continuum of counter-mapping to illuminate the heights of Black culture.

THE BLACK ELEVATION MAP

The Black Elevation Map is an uplifting domestic travel utility that visualizes Black cultural data as elevation. The greater the density of data, the higher the elevation. Through the Map, Black & Abroad has created a tool to see and navigate the U.S. in a way that centers on both Black users and the country’s Blackness. In this way, it is transparent and purposeful about its bias.

DATA VISUALIZATION

At the center of the experience is a visualization of +330,000,000 points of data which reveals insights about population distribution and where Black-owned businesses and cultural institutions are likely to be present, absent, and in what abundance.

SCALE

+330,000,000 points of data

+28,000 Black-owned businesses

+6,600 cultural sites

+100 guides with a CMS built for ongoing administration

TOUCHPOINTS

BlackElevationMap.com

“A Hymn Away From Home” launch film

27 individual business mini-documentaries

Geo-targeted, signal-triggered digital media

CURATED CONTENT

Users can explore the map through 12 curated city guides and 10 national guides, which contain dozens of original content models, such as Black-owned wineries (“Melanin Vines”) and restaurants that fueled civil rights (“Civil Bites”).

TOUCHPOINTS

BlackElevationMap.com

“A Hymn Away From Home” launch film and cutdowns

27 individual business mini-documentaries

Geo-targeted, signal-triggered online media

SCALE

+330,000,000 points of data

+28,000 Black-owned businesses

+6,600 cultural sites

+100 guides with a CMS built for ongoing administration

“Add to map” for Black-owned businesses and organizations

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.

ICONS & TYPE

The headline font used throughout this project is “Martin” and was created by American designer Tré Seals based on Civil Rights protest posters. The body copy is “Du Bois”, inspired by that legendary graphic designer’s work. Seals also created the project’s original “points of interest” icon set, based on West African symbology.

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

PR

“Turning heads and garnering plenty of attention online.” – Condé Nast Traveller

“The Black Excellence Visual We've Needed” – Travel Noir