Cinédit app by Ciné Souk, beta testing in Prague, October 2016
...or "Why destinations need to embrace crowdsourced content"
"Our job is to ensure Adelaide Hills gets its share of voice in travel media" was the cri de cœur by Bill Nehmy, head of the region's tourism association.
Bill joined me on a panel at the International Federation for Information Technology and Travel & Tourism's Australian seminar series on the sharing economy at the University of South Australia.
Yet as I outlined the concept behind Ciné Souk, of crowdsourced travel videos, it became clear that growing the pie, rather than fighting over the slices of the existing pie, has not yet entered the destination marketing orthodoxy.
Just as Brexit Britain and Trumpland demonstrate that the lump of labour fallacy is alive and well (insofar as a majority of people believe there is a fixed amount of labour that can only be share out), so too do many tourism boards believe that there is a finite amount of coverage that needs to be shared out.
But this ignores search engines.
We now take for granted that every town, suburb or city on earth has a Wikipedia entry. So too, do we take for granted that there are some images of every destination either user-generated or professional under the image tab of Google. There will be probably be some news articles too.
But video? Well, large tourism boards have video, but smaller regional boards, local associations and suburban chambers of commerce have yet to embrace video. Chiefly because it's too expensive.
But if we can harness the power of the crowd to take videos for them, then we can solve this shortage. If just 1% of the 1.5 billion smartphone users can be incentivised to use their high definition cameras to collect footage, then we have an army of 15 million videographers.
This is where collaborative marketing comes in. There is an estimated 42 million complementary hotel nights globally set aside for travel journalists by tourism boards. If we can match this reward up with the crowdsourced video army, then we have an incentive. Add a share of the pay per view revenue and you can approach a CPM of $1000.
This is where Ciné Souk comes in. Remember when no-one photographed their food?Well, within two years, you'll be saying "remember when no-one filmed their hotel rooms?".
And then, that fourth tab in Google, videos, will be full of videos from every single destination on earth. The pie will have grown a thousand-fold.
