The popular short drama about tourism and culture is still waiting for a hit

Short dramas have been very popular recently. They have directly made many tourist attractions popular; "Go Where the Wind Is" is to Dali, and "Flower City" is to Huanghe Road in Shanghai. Various cultural and tourism industries have begun to enter the market, and short dramas about cultural and tourism have become popular and will continue to heat up.

The trend of cultural and tourism short dramas has arrived.

Recently, the short play screenwriter Qiqi received an invitation from a local cultural and tourism bureau to write a short play for them to introduce the local natural scenery.

Qiqi was not surprised that the Cultural and Tourism Bureau was filming a short play. In recent months, she has often seen posts on major social media looking for screenwriters for cultural and tourism short plays from all over the country, and many of her colleagues are also doing it. "Dingjiao" randomly asked several short play directors and producers, and they all said that they had done or were doing cultural and tourism short plays, and some even started last year.

What is a cultural and tourism short play?

In form, it is very similar to the commercial short dramas that are well known to the public. A single episode is 2-3 minutes long, and it focuses on excitement and fast pace. However, it is led by the local cultural and tourism department, and its purpose is not to make users spend money to watch the drama, but to make them attracted by the natural and cultural scenery in the drama, go on a trip and check in, and boost the local cultural and tourism market.

It can be understood as using low-cost short plays to replicate the grand occasion of "one play makes a city popular" in long plays, such as "Go Where the Wind Is" to Dali and "Fang Hua" to Shanghai's Huanghe Road.

In January this year, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television issued the "Travel with Micro-Short Dramas" creation plan, encouraging the integration of "micro-short dramas + cultural tourism" to promote consumption. Under the policy encouragement, the radio, film and television industries and cultural tourism departments in various places have taken mass actions to promote the popularity of cultural tourism short dramas.

However, cultural tourism short plays are very different from commercial short plays in terms of subject matter, broadcast channels, and business models. How to grasp the scale of creation, how to better integrate scenic spots into the story, and how to achieve both publicity effects and make the audience love watching are issues that screenwriters and cultural tourism departments are still exploring.

Cultural and tourism short dramas are still waiting for more hits.

1. Cultural tourism short dramas are popular

Producer Zhan Zhikun has been very busy recently. He has received olive branches from many places across the country, including Hebei, Chongqing, and Xinjiang, asking him to collaborate on a cultural and tourism short drama.

He used to work on commercial short plays, but only started working on cultural and tourism short plays in February this year. Fortunately, the first play he filmed, "Meeting, My Lord Ouyang Xiu," received a good response. The play was shot in Yongfeng County, the hometown of Ouyang Xiu, one of the Eight Great Masters of the Tang and Song Dynasties, Enjiang Ancient City, Xiyang Palace and other places. It was directed by Jin Wenhan and premiered on iQiyi, with an exposure of over 300 million on the entire network. The success of the play also made many local cultural and tourism bureaus approach him to cooperate.

Zhan Zhikun feels that cultural and tourism short plays have become a trend and will continue to heat up.

How popular are cultural and tourism short dramas nowadays?

"Focus" learned that both popular tourist destinations such as Hong Kong and Xinjiang and relatively unpopular cities such as Zhangjiakou are producing short cultural and tourism plays. Some cultural and tourism departments even started preparing short play crews before they had attracted investment or decided which local attractions to promote.

Judging from the data, DataEye's "2024 Micro-Short Drama Purchase Volume and Investment Data Report" pointed out that cultural and tourism short dramas will become an important new force in this year's short drama market and will usher in a big explosion. It is estimated that the scale of short drama investment in 2024 will exceed 40 billion.

The popularity of cultural and tourism short plays can be summarized into three main reasons: the booming tourism industry; the popularity of the short play format and controllable costs; and policy support and encouragement.

Since last year, a new internet celebrity city has appeared every once in a while, including Zibo BBQ, Harbin Small Potatoes, Tianshui Malatang, Kaifeng Wangpo, etc.

According to data from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, during this year's May Day holiday, a total of 295 million domestic tourists traveled nationwide, a year-on-year increase of 7.6%. The total expenditure of domestic tourists was 166.89 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 12.7% and an increase of 13.5% compared with the same period in 2019.

Under the wave of national tourism, cultural and tourism departments in various places have also gone crazy, attracting tourists from all over the world through food, services, and even matchmaking. There is a natural space for the combination of film and television dramas and cultural tourism. There have been many successful cases before, such as "Go Where the Wind Is" which made Fengyang Village in Dali popular, and "Flowers" made Huanghe Road in Shanghai a popular tourist attraction overnight. Recently, after the broadcast of "My Altay", Xinjiang has become one of the hottest tourist destinations.

However, in actual operation, for the cultural and tourism departments, the financial investment and creation threshold of a long drama are very high. It was not until the short drama format became popular last year that they began to try new things. According to the description of several practitioners, in the second half of last year, after the short drama "Escape from the British Museum" with the theme of protecting cultural relics went viral in a small circle, cultural and tourism short dramas were targeted by various places.

Zhao Bin, general manager of Chengdu Xingwen Investment Development Co., Ltd., told Dingjiao, "Many tourist attractions do not have the conditions for filming long dramas in terms of tourism resources and urban resources, but there is a bright spot in them, which can be presented in short dramas to achieve twice the result with half the effort. At present, cultural tourism short dramas are a beneficial supplement to publicity and marketing."

With the support of policies, everyone’s enthusiasm is even higher.

In January this year, the State Administration of Radio and Television released the "Travel with Micro-Short Dramas" creation plan, with the goal of creating and broadcasting 100 excellent themed micro-short dramas in 2024, and promoting a number of physical filming locations to "go viral" following the popularity of the micro-short dramas.

The short drama "There's Wind on My Way Home", which is included in the first batch of recommended creation plans, tells the story of an urban white-collar worker returning to Leshan, Sichuan to explore intangible cultural heritage food. It cleverly integrates Leshan's food culture and regional culture into the plot. It has been broadcast over 190 million times and became popular in a small circle during the Spring Festival, directly boosting the local tourism market in Leshan.

2. Cultural tourism short plays, exploring while running

Although there are some representative cultural and tourism short plays, they are different from commercial short plays in terms of presentation form, subject matter, broadcast channels, business model, cooperation form, etc., and there is no unified standard.

In terms of format, cultural and tourism short dramas are available in both horizontal and vertical screens.

Generally speaking, the popular commercial short dramas in the past two years are all in vertical screen mode, with each episode lasting 1-2 minutes, and a drama has hundreds of episodes, but the cultural tourism short dramas have both horizontal and vertical screens, and the length of a single episode ranges from less than 2 minutes to 3-5 minutes. The total number of episodes is relatively short, and "My Way Home Has Wind" has only 18 episodes.

A practitioner told Dingjiao that cultural and tourism short dramas are more suitable for horizontal screens, and the length of each episode should be slightly longer, about 4 minutes is best, to facilitate the display of landscape scenes.

In terms of broadcasting channels, cultural and tourism short dramas are mainly broadcast on long and short video platforms rather than mini programs.

Commercial short plays are usually watched in mini programs and major short play apps. Cultural and tourism short plays are more valued on long and short video platforms such as iQiyi, Youku, Tencent Video, and Douyin.

Zhao Bin told "Dingjiao" that the user portraits of cultural and tourism short dramas and commercial short dramas do not overlap. Compared with mini programs, the user base of long and short video platforms is wider.

In terms of business model, the two are even more different.

Commercial short dramas rely purely on user payments and can be roughly divided into three types. The first is to unlock a single episode, priced at about 1 yuan per episode; the second is to unlock the entire series in batches, which costs 9.9 yuan, 19 yuan, or 38 yuan; and there is also a high price to purchase the entire series, which is basically priced at more than 100 yuan.

Cultural and tourism short plays are mostly free for users. According to practitioners, the main income of cultural and tourism short plays comes from advertisers, such as local scenic spots or enterprises. Some can also obtain funding from relevant government departments, that is, toB or toG.

The above-mentioned practitioners explained that this is mainly because the primary purpose of cultural tourism short plays is publicity rather than making money. Zhao Bin believes that this business model is actually still a traditional advertising film model and is not fully market-oriented.

As for the cooperation model, the production team of commercial short plays is relatively independent and can customize the platform or invest all of its own capital, with a wide range of subject matter choices. Cultural and tourism short plays tend to be customized, with the producers serving the local cultural and tourism departments and earning production fees such as script creation and filming.

At present, the combination of short plays and local cultural tourism is relatively simple. The most common way is to make the place where the story takes place, and the story of the hero and heroine unfolds around this place. There is not even much plot, and the main purpose is to show the local scenery and let the audience see this attraction. The previously popular "Escape from the British Museum" is set up more pleasingly. The heroine is a jade pot that escaped from the British Museum and turned into a cute girl. On the way, she met a Chinese media person working overseas, and the two went home together. The film was created spontaneously by users, not led by the cultural and tourism department.

The local cultural and tourism departments will not give producers KPIs on the number of views, etc., as long as they are successfully filmed and put online. The production team is willing to take on cultural and tourism short dramas, not to make a lot of money. They all said that cultural and tourism short dramas are still difficult to replicate the "overnight wealth" of commercial short dramas, and are more for gaining experience or just finding a job.

The production cost of short cultural and tourism dramas is relatively low. It is understood that 5 million is the upper limit, and many cost only over 100,000 yuan. The teams that make short cultural and tourism dramas are even more diverse. Some cultural and tourism departments will look for teams with rich experience, but some will also look for small companies that have no experience in producing short and long dramas due to limited connections and funds.

3. Still waiting for more hits

Cultural and tourism short plays are still in the exploratory stage, and practitioners unanimously agree that the biggest difficulty now lies in screenwriting.

On the one hand, there are some restrictions on the content. For example, the misdiagnosis plot that is commonly used in short plays is not allowed in some cultural tourism short plays. Screenwriter Qiqi said that screenwriters need to spend a lot of effort on the type of subject matter, the scale of plot creation, and the integration of stories and attractions. In commercial short plays, the most common theme for men is the god of war, and the theme for women is revenge. However, cultural tourism short plays are not suitable for costume dramas, revenge and bitter dramas, which means that they naturally lose the "traffic code".

On the other hand, how to balance publicity and commerciality is also a science.

Qiqi usually pursues excitement and sad moments when writing short plays, while cultural tourism short plays are mainly for local publicity, and the two have different ideas. For example, if she writes about the protagonist's counterattack, the counterattack protagonist of the cultural tourism short play also has to walk around the mountain.

She watched a short drama about tourism. Most of the first episode was about the quarrel between the male and female protagonists. The plot was very exciting, but at the end, the female protagonist suddenly said that she wanted to go to a certain mountain for a trip to change her mood, which made her feel out of the play. She also saw short dramas that did not actively cue local attractions, such as the male and female protagonists meeting at a certain scenic spot, but this format made it difficult for the audience to pay attention to this attraction.

Zhan Zhikun admitted that many publicity points of cultural tourism projects will lead to a decrease in the commerciality (exposure) of the drama. In order to take into account the commerciality of the short drama and the publicity requirements of the cultural tourism department, they will think of many ways, such as letting the screenwriter team work. The script of "Meeting, My Lord Ouyang Xiu" was completed by director Jin Wenhan, four screenwriters and a script-killing expert.

"Cultural tourism short plays are propositional essays. I can create many stories and ideas around the needs of the client, but I cannot guarantee that they will go viral." Qiqi admitted. Screenwriter Nan'an told "Dingjiao" that their creative method is to first thoroughly study the points that the client needs to promote and see what kind of story they are suitable for, and the story serves the scenic spot.

Another major difficulty is the business model.

Zhao Bin believes that the pure toB or toG format is not conducive to the sustainable development of cultural tourism short dramas. He analyzed from the perspective of cultural tourism scenic spots, "We hope that online traffic can be converted into offline consumption, such as audiences traveling to the local area because of this drama, buying tickets to a certain attraction or related cultural and creative products. But at present, there are still few short dramas that can achieve this effect."

"If the money is spent without any results, no scenic spot or city can continue to do this." He thinks that cultural and tourism short plays should adopt the ToC model.

However, some practitioners have raised objections, arguing that if ToC adopts the profit-sharing model and earns money from the audience watching the show, it would be better to make a purely commercial short drama.

Who will pay for the short cultural tourism dramas? Is the starting point of content creation to serve the cultural tourism departments or the audience? These directly affect the direction of the short cultural tourism dramas. The consensus is that we should find a balance between ToB and ToC and create new cultural tourism dramas with stories and plots.

In addition, practitioners remind that many people have misunderstandings about the "shortness" of cultural and tourism short dramas.

Local governments are optimistic about short cultural and tourism dramas because the domestic market size of short micro dramas exceeds 37.3 billion yuan, and the time spent on planning, creation, shooting, and production is shorter than that of long dramas and movies. However, the fact is that short cultural and tourism dramas only look short. If you want to shoot them well, you need to spend as much time and energy as a long drama. The cultural and tourism departments should think clearly about their needs, rather than rushing in when they see that they are popular.

"Cultural and tourism scenic spots are online and offline business operations. Cultural and tourism short dramas must do sufficient research and planning in the early stages to know what the characteristics of the scenic spot are and what the core selling points of consumption are. Otherwise, the things shot can easily become self-entertainment." Zhao Bin revealed that they currently have a cultural and tourism short drama about pandas, which began planning two or three years ago and is now in production. The threshold for creating this drama is not low, with each episode being about 10 minutes long, a total of 100 episodes, and a cost of more than 10 million.

More than one industry insider feels that even though cultural and tourism short dramas are very popular now, and are still in a period of sustained growth under various support policies, only when more and more popular dramas emerge can more outstanding practitioners be attracted and this genre can truly continue to be popular.

* The pictures in this article are from the Douyin app. At the request of the interviewees, Qiqi and Nan'an are pseudonyms.