Sightseeing is a big part of travel, especially for those who flock to sunny California from drearier climes. Los Angeles weather can brighten a visitor’s day, as can a celebrity sighting. To tantalize this appetite, and engage younger demographics, LA Tourism has unleashed a series of immersive experiences across social media.
In their most recent effort, launched yesterday, LA Tourism partnered with augmented-reality (AR) startup Kabaq (a subsidiary of The Glimpse Group). With a Snapchat lens, users in New York and other key markets get a visual representation of what a west coast sunset would look like behind their city’s skyline.
According to Bill Karz, VP of Digital for Los Angeles Tourism & Convention Board, the new Snapchat lens, which will be available through April 17, is “seeking out the millennial and Gen Z market in key DMAs like New York, Chicago, Washington DC, Baltimore, Boston, Atlanta, Dallas and Denver…specifically, those individuals with the propensity to travel.”
He explained, “At the beginning of our fiscal year, we established the goal of finding unique ways to engage with our core audiences. We also set out to leverage immersive tech to complement the traveler’s journey, so that travelers yearn for the Los Angeles experience.”
Snapchat users can look at the surrounding cityscape through their phones and see a Los Angeles sunset in the background, behind the more familiar surroundings of their particular market. Concurrently, the tourism board has an ongoing in-market campaign – “Everyone is Welcome” in the City of Angels – running on TV, digital, out-of-home, and in print.
LA Tourism considered Kabaq for this new project after seeing an AR lens they created in partnership with The Economist, based on the future of food around the world. “We happened to be collaborating with an award-winning local time-lapse photographer, Chris Pritchard, who has been capturing L.A.’s epic sunsets for a while,” Karz said. “At the same time, the Kabaq team was testing out sky segmentation in Snapchat. The idea presented itself during a discussion of other immersive tech integrations, and this clearly became the favorite.”
“Snapchat is a great platform for augmented reality experiences both from a technological standpoint and because of the user base,” said Alper Guler, co-founder and managing partner of Kabaq. “Every day, millions of people open Snapchat and try AR lenses in billions of unique messages. They know what to do when they start an AR experience – you don’t need to educate them what to do with it. This isn’t the case on other platforms.”
Guler holds dear the famous statement by sixties media sage Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message. “It means that the nature of a medium (the channel through which a message is transmitted) is more important than the meaning or content of the message,” he explained. “This couldn’t be more applicable for AR. It’s a new medium, and to do it successfully, you have to exploit its ability to augment the world. When we first read about the new Sky Segmentation feature that Snapchat offered, we thought it was a perfect example of how to change your sense of place.”
He added, “When the LA Tourism and Convention Board came to us, we instantly saw the opportunity to highlight the glorious weather and sunsets that LA provides, and to use the medium of AR to its fullest potential.”
LA Tourism challenged people’s sense of place earlier this year by deploying mixed-reality celebrity holograms, offering life-sized engagement with a recognizable person who wasn’t really there. In collaboration with mixed reality studio VNTANA, LA Tourism debuted a hologram of retired Lakers star Kobe Bryant at a January trade show in Pittsburgh. A hologram of Mexican-born actor Diego Boneta kicked off a real-time social media giveaway.
“Through life-size holograms, we have provided engaging activations for key B2B clients and stakeholders in the travel and tourism space,” said Bill Karz. “At the same time, these celebrity holograms delivered moments of unique interaction with consumers. For example, our event activation in Mexico City with actor Diego Boneta not only reached the 620 clients in attendance; Diego also launched the first-ever trip giveaway on Instagram, via hologram. Our PR team then worked diligently to share this L.A.-moment with media, generating millions of impressions.”
Whether dreamily staring off into a rosy horizon, or gawking at a close-by celebrity hologram, the prospective traveler will ultimately be led back to Los Angeles by these new augmented and mixed reality special effects.
