3.1. Fluency and Flexibility: “Our Destination Has so Much to Offer! Ours Too!”
Within advertising creativity research, the dimension of meaningfulness [
43] has been introduced in order to point out that the advertisement not only has to rely on a novel communication approach (that is divergent from existing forms of communication), but the message also has to convey product-related information relevant to the customer. “This means that the overall idea, the message, and the information about the advertised product must convey a singular message that is relevant to the targeted customer” [
45]. The singular message that the destination promotional videos are trying to convey is “visit our destination” and as such we can judge all of the videos as inherently meaningful. However, the number of reasons on as to why to visit (value propositions and their categories) differ amongst the videos. The results are presented in
Table 2.
Fluency refers to the number of value propositions within a video and flexibility refers to the number of different categories of value propositions within a video (
Table 3). Both of these two dimensions are high in the analysed YouTube videos: in general, the impression given is that the destinations often try to persuade with almost as many reasons to visit a specific destination as they can think of. In each video, we counted all sequences or visuals that presents value propositions (fluency) and sorted them by categories (flexibility) and then counted the number of categories of value propositions.
On average, the videos used a very large number of value propositions within a video—The average fluency of a video was 23.5 sequences. Similarly, flexibility or the number of categories of value propositions was very high: on average five categories were included in a video. Within the relatively short time span (length of most videos is 1 to 3 minutes) the video producers thus generally tried to convince the viewers to visit the destination with at least eight different categories of reasons to visit a specific destination. In other words, they strived to represent the high diversity of their destination and the many different activities a visitor can engage in.
This indicates the inherent complexity of destination marketing in relation to other types of marketing. As Fyall and Garrod [
49] point out “destinations are notoriously difficult to manage due to the complex systems of stakeholders”. Destinations as “products” include extreme diversity and one of the most important challenges is to balance between complexity and simplicity. On the one hand the DMOs need to secure the various tourism stakeholders’ interests to be represented by the national destination marketing, while on the other they need to simplify the value propositions to a singular message that is relevant to the targeted customer that the tourists will recognise and remember as unique.
This furthermore reveals an inherent paradox of the analysed promotional videos: in striving to be different by enumerating various reasons on why to visit a destination, they become very similar. So similar in fact, that we can identify three main thematic types of destination promotional videos: (a) videos with a focus on representing tourists’ emotional states (e.g., happiness, joy, relaxation), (b) videos with a focus on natural or cultural heritage (e.g., waterfalls, landscape, architecture) (c) videos with a focus on tourists’ activities (e.g., sports, sightseeing). In
Table 3, we can see how common each of the three types were.
The majority of videos were dominated by close-up visuals of tourists’ emotional states: well-being, pleasure and remembering or dreaming about the destination (51%). An example is the video of Ecuador, where the main character claims, that “Ecuador is all you need”, that “there is love at every turn” (
Figure 1).
The second most common thematic type (26%) was videos with a focus on destination’s natural or cultural heritage, where they represent material and not on human characters. An example is the Armenian video, where they emphasize Armenia’s cultural heritage by showing the natural landscape, churches, traditional food and music (
Figure 2).
Finally, in 15% of the videos, the emphasis was placed on showing the activities that tourists can perform at the destination. Mostly this includes sports or sightseeing. For example, in a video of Austria, the video includes representations of rowing on a lake, picking plants, hiking and cycling (
Figure 3).
In some videos (Mixed: 8%) it was not possible to determine the main theme, as the presentation of the destination was presented through a mix of two or three themes. An important example here would be the case of Indonesia since this was the video that in the end received the UNWTO competition award rewarded by both the jury and the viewers. The video’s main themes activities (
Figure 4) and emotions (
Figure 5) were approximately equally mixed. The accompanying musical background of “What a wonderful world” [
53] emphasizes the intact nature that tourists can experience and invites the viewer to daydream about the destination. The fact that the awarding video was one of the videos that did not belong to any of the three main thematic types might be an important confirmation that the way forward in creative destination promotion is in stepping outside of the typical, common thematic approaches.
Similar to results of Uşaklı et al. [
25] who analysed the themes in social media use of 50 European national DMOs, the analysis here showed that the most common categories of value propositions were visuals of tourists performing generic, common tourism activities (such as sightseeing, visiting museums, hiking): 84% of videos included at least one such sequence, with the average being 5.4 per video (see
Table 4).
The second most common type of value propositions were stunning visual representations of the destination’s nature (no people included in the visuals): 77% of videos included at least one such sequence while on average they were included 4.2 times per video. Representations of cultural heritage (stunning visuals of, for example, architecture) were the third most common element, with 72% of videos including at least one such visual sequence, the average being three. The fourth most common type of value propositions were representations of tourists having fun and/or dancing, followed by activities representing tourists—Hosts interactions. A third of the videos included in-depth visual representations of tourists enjoying their senses (e.g., a close-up of a person smelling herbs and flowers). Other two categories were minor in extent: close-ups of local cuisine or music (no people included).
3.2. Originality: If Each and Every Destination Is Unique How Can One Stand Out?
Originality represents ideas and elements that are uncommon, rare or surprising, remote, clever [
6,
55] and are unique solutions to a problem [
56]. These original ideas should also be appropriate considering the aim [
57,
58]. Originality is a mandatory element if we want to ensure creativity. If something is not unusual, new or unique, it is usual or conventional. Ideas and products that are purely original can also be very useless [
59], thus originality also needs to include meaningfulness.
When we attempted to analyse the third dimension of creativity: originality, operationalized as the number of sequences showing value propositions that are highly infrequent/unique to a specific destination, we encountered a specific problem that at first seemed only a “measurement” dilemma: the coders could not agree on which sequences would be original. After thoughtful deliberation, however, we realized this was not the problem of measurement but highlighted the essence of the problem of creative visual advertising in destination branding.
To illustrate the dilemma: one of the common sequences in the videos was a video representation of a waterfall. This means that including a waterfall is not original since most destinations strive to represent waterfalls. On the other hand, this specific waterfall is only one in the world, albeit not necessarily one of a kind. What the DMOs try to achieve is to represent the specific waterfall as stunningly as possible in order to try to convince the viewer that this waterfall is truly one of a kind. This also means that originality is extremely difficult to analyse via identifying unique value propositions since, in a way, all of them are unique. To illustrate, there can be no doubt that there are after all only one Victoria Falls in the world, as they appear in the video of Zambia. However, the same can be argued for the Tiu Kelep Waterfall in West Nusa Tenggara as it appears in the video of Indonesia: although much less known and recognisable it is still unique since there is only one in the world.
The quest for originality in the analysed videos reveals the quest for the “holy grail” of destination promotion: what Pearce [
60] terms “intrinsic impact”. This refers to the unadorned power of places and settings to capture visitor attention and evoke strong emotional responses. As Pearce [
60] warns, “often these places are asked to do too much: to affect the viewer without explanation and without interpretation”. Similarly, we can argue that often the visual promotion of a destination asks too much from the viewer: to be able to recognise the uniqueness of a waterfall amongst all other promoted waterfalls. This means that the video producers usually need to look for ways to stand out and be different in other means. Here we turn to the fourth “classical” dimension of creativity: elaboration.
3.3. Elaboration: Tell Me a (Funny) Story
Elaboration as defined originally is the extent of detail in the ideas [
41]. Later analyses included measures of one’s imagination whereby participants were instructed to imagine everything they can think of about an event in as much detail as possible, including actions, people, and feelings [
61]. In other words, broadly understood, participants were asked to indulge in storytelling. Ang and Low [
43] identified emotional content as one of the dimensions of advertisement creativity. Smith et al. [
44] identified four dimensions that can broadly be understood as extending the original concept of elaboration: (a) elaboration: present with ads that include unexpected details, or finish and extend basic ideas so they become more intricate, complicated, or sophisticated; (b) synthesis: present with ads that combine, connect, or blend normally unrelated objects or ideas; (c) artistic value: present with ads that contain artistic verbal impressions or attractive colors or shapes; and (d) imagination: ads that help consumers form vivid mental images, or make something unreal come to life.
We operationalised elaboration as the extent of detail value propositions are presented with. Here we first analysed the videos qualitatively, as a whole in order to identify what are the approaches in the analysed destination branding towards the elaboration features of a promotional ad. The analysis identified two main approaches that are the extremes on the same dimension: storytelling versus collage.
Storytelling in destination branding is a concept that has a very broad meaning, as the process of storytelling involves not only sharing the story with listeners but also the design of the story and all the details of its content, which must be designed and presented to attract listeners [
62]. Moin, Hosany and O’Brien [
63] point out that storytelling in DMO’s promotional videos is still in its infancy, potentially causing a massive loss for the tourism industry. Fog, Budtz and Yakaboylu [
64] identified four elements essential for building a story in branding: (a) message, (b) conflict, (c) characters and (d) the chronology of events. The analysis of our sample showed that three of these story elements were included in the storytelling videos, the fourth: conflict, however, was completely absent. We explain this primarily by the fact that destinations do not want to advertise that something negative can happen or go wrong and thus look only for very positive or harmonious story plots. Consequently, we have labelled as story those videos that meet the broader definition of Deighton, Romer, and McQueen [
65] who state that the chronological order of a story and the protagonist are the main elements that can be labelled as a story.
Our research confirms the argument of Moin, Hosany and O’Brien [
63] that storytelling in destination brand promotional videos is still in its infancy. Only 15% of the analysed videos (
Table 5) included clear storytelling elements: following one main protagonist or a few protagonists in their sequences of events. Almost a third of the videos (26%) are videos where one of the three elements of storytelling can be detected: most often the main character is repeatedly shown in several sequences that are, however, not connected into a chain of events and are thus not a proper story (
Table 5).
Storytelling in promotion has an important added value: it evokes emotions and accentuates the experiential elements [
66]. We claim here that it is an important indicator of creativity in destination brand marketing via extending the dimension of elaboration (at least for now when it is still rather uncommon). On the other extreme, opposite to storytelling is what we term here as “collage”: a mix of different thematic sequences with no story plot or storytelling elements. In collage, we cannot determine the main character, and there is no sequence of events. Through the approach of a collage, the DMO’s desire to show as much as the destination has to offer as they can: reflecting the high flexibility and fluency of the videos identified earlier in
Table 2.
The collage as a subgenre of destination brand promotional videos is an equivalent of so called “lists” [
67] or “factual ads” [
68] that provide direct descriptions of product features and benefits. Compared to storytelling approaches, the “lists” have been showed to be less effective forms of promotion than storytelling, for example in affective reactions, ad attitudes and purchase intentions [
67] and ad message involvement and subsequent product evaluations [
68]. The reasons lie primarily in the fact that these types of advertisements do not involve characters for a long enough time for the audiences to develop an emotional involvement. Additionally, they represent a greater repetition and thus manage less successfully to keep the audience’s attention.
While storytelling is one of the clearest ways for a destination brand promotional video to stand out, another similarly poignant way of inclusion of elaboration as the dimension of creativity is using humor. Similarly to storytelling, humor too has been recognised for a long time as an effective means to gain audiences’ attention in advertising [
69]. Porres-Guerrero and Foronda-Robles [
70] claim that the use of humor in tourism marketing is a strategy to promote commitment, loyalty and the uniqueness of the destination. Humor is thought to have a more significant impact on product advertising because it is easier to assess these as experiences [
71]. Additionally, humor is often the one that attracts the attention of less attentive viewers [
72].
Sternthal and Craig [
73] explain that the definition of humor requires an examination of responses elicited by recognizable stimuli. Humor is something that connects, and laughter is a key part in maintaining well-being in people. Advertisements by themselves are often considered as an annoying disturbance and they are better accepted if they make the viewer or listener smile [
7]. Porres-Guerrero and Foronda-Robles [
70] claim that the use of humor in tourism marketing is a strategy to promote commitment, loyalty and the uniqueness of the destination. However, we cannot claim that humor will always be successful or that this will be the only way to connect a brand with the viewer. The key to its success is proper use, which can be tricky as there is a danger that not everyone perceives humor in the same light, so it is more important to use the appropriate type of humor as well [
7,
69].
Regarding humor in advertising, research shows that male gender is generally more in favor of humorous ads than the female gender [
74]. The perception of humor in advertisements is also said to be influenced by the humorous orientation of the individual, which affects his response and the likeability of the ad. Very successful are commercials that evoke a feeling of warmth in individuals and are highly humorous [
69]. Buijzen and Valkenburg [
75] found that seven different types of humor appear in video ads, which can have different effects: (a) clownish humor; the simplest type of humor that involves funny moving hands and feet, (b) surprise: considered a low level of humor, contains sudden changes in concepts and images, (c) slapstick: a high level of humor where it’s about unfriendly humor and “a physical pie-in-the-face type of humor”, (d) misunderstanding: a relatively low level of humor that reflects laughing at others, ignorance, or disappointment, (e) irony: sarcasm and puns, (f) satire: mocking a famous person or situation, and (g) parody: is a more complex type of humor that requires knowledge and a special media style or genre that is parodied. In our analysis we counted a video as including humor if it included at least one of the seven types of humor identified by Buijzen and Valkenburg [
75].
In
Table 6 we can see that 16.4% of the videos included some elements of humor. As an example, we can highlight the video of Switzerland in the analysed sample (
Figure 6), where they use slapstick type of humor to present the main character, who convinces people that he can master acrobatic skiing, even though he hired a professional acrobatic skier in same clothes that took pictures instead of him.