The growth logic of the cultural tourism industry has changed

This article explores the changes and challenges faced by the cultural tourism industry after the explosion of localized content. It is recommended to readers who are interested in new industries and short dramas. Let’s take a look~

Following Harbin's explosion in popularity at the beginning of the year, Tianshui Malatang has recently taken over the throne of the top short video, pushing Tianshui, Gansu to become another popular tourist destination. Meituan data shows that since March, the number of Malatang dine-in orders in Tianshui, Gansu has increased by more than 140% compared with the same period in February. During the same period, homestay reservations have also increased by nearly 2 times year-on-year.

Like Zibo barbecue before, the sudden popularity of Tianshui Malatang is largely due to the widespread dissemination of social media. On the Douyin platform, the number of views of the topic "Tianshui Malatang" alone exceeded 2.04 billion. Looking back at the birth of "hot tourist destinations", it is not difficult to find that short video content with local life as the background has replaced the "dressing show" of cultural and tourism directors in various places and become the new traffic code of "Internet celebrity cities".

In connection with the "Travel with Micro-Short Dramas" creation plan released by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television at the beginning of the year, short video platforms are undoubtedly expected to promote the new development of the cultural tourism industry. From the directors of cultural and tourism bureaus competing to make their debuts and endorsements to the popularity of localized content, what has happened to the cultural tourism industry? Behind this question, there is actually a new challenge that the cultural tourism industry is facing.

1. Short video + cultural tourism, the debut of a new industry CP

In the past, the promotional methods of local cultural and tourism bureaus were mainly hard advertising. Common forms include background placement and patch advertising in CCTV weather forecasts, as well as display advertising inside large city airports and railway stations. However, since social media entered the video era, the upgrade of media dimensions has also raised tourism destination marketing to a new level, and the influence of content has been continuously magnified, and is more directly reflected in the development of cultural and tourism integration.

A classic example is that Henan TV's "Wonderful Tour" series of programs, which have repeatedly broken the circle through innovative interpretation of traditional culture in the past two years, has attracted countless users from the content level alone. People marveled at the beauty of the underwater dance "Water Ode to the Goddess of Luo River" in the "Wonderful Tour of Dragon Boat Festival" series, were moved by the vast family affection of "Lanling King's Battle Song", immersed in the time and space shuttle of "Wonderful Tour of Lantern Festival", and were shocked by the magnificent and magnificent audio-visual images of "Chinese Mythology: Nuwa Patching the Sky".

It is worth noting that although the "Wonderful Tour Series" content was broadcast at the festival party, it did not completely adopt the traditional stage performance format, but integrated plot performances and rich immersive scenes to achieve the independence of the content. The benefit brought by this is that the content is no longer limited to a specific scene such as the "party", and the content also has the ability to extend to short video platforms to gain continuous attention.

Soon after the broadcast of "Dragon Boat Festival Wonderful Tour", a large number of Douyin users posted clips of the entire gala and individual programs. It was more than two months later that the "Henan Spring Festival Gala Official" Douyin account officially launched the program content. The spontaneous secondary creation of short video users not only brought a lot of exposure to the program content, but also jointly pushed up the popularity of the topic of "Dragon Boat Festival Wonderful Tour". On the Douyin platform, the topic of "Dragon Boat Festival Wonderful Tour" alone received more than 330 million views and generated nearly 100 derivative topics. The "Tang Palace Night Banquet", which also quickly became popular on the short video platform, has reached 970 million views.

According to a report by Henan TV, as of September last year, the "Chinese Festivals" series of programs had been read over 82 billion times online, and the total number of views on overseas platforms exceeded 50 million. With the help of short videos, high-quality content has undoubtedly found an efficient "traffic code" for cultural communication, and "culture" has since become a signboard of Henan's cultural tourism. This communication model has not only been promoted overseas many times by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but also provided direct support for subsequent commercial realization.

In addition to the "Wonderful Tour Series", Henan Tourism began to systematically utilize and develop cultural resources. Through the popularity of "Tang Palace Night Banquet", the traffic was retained to the Henan Cultural and Museum Institute, and a series of cultural and creative products such as "archaeological blind boxes" were created to make tourists addicted to digging for "treasures". "Fuhao Owl Zun" and "Cloud Pattern Bronze Ban" were transformed into refrigerator magnets, brooches, and necklaces, and oracle bone emojis became the "new favorite" of picture-taking.

In addition, the dramatized interpretation of online short videos has also extended to offline. The "Only Henan Drama Fantasy City" drama theme park in Zhengzhou has created the Heluo cultural immersive drama model "Wind from Luoyang" and "Searching for the Goddess of Luo River". When tourists experience offline, they not only sit in the audience to watch, but can participate in it and become part of the performance. The spontaneous spread brought by the experience can not only retain tourists but also increase online traffic. According to official data, since the premiere of "Wind from Luoyang" and "Searching for the Goddess of Luo River" in June 2021, the total number of viewers inside and outside the province has been nearly 3 million, and one-third of the tourists came to Henan specifically for watching the drama.

The collaborative innovation of the cultural tourism industry based on content not only helped Henan to "go viral" culturally, but also turned into real money. According to data released by the Henan Provincial Government, Henan Province received 995 million tourists in 2023, with tourism revenue of 964.56 billion yuan. The number of tourists received was 228.2% of the same period in 2022 and 110.6% of the same period in 2019; tourism revenue was 305.2% of the same period in 2022 and 100.4% of the same period in 2019.

Through a series of video content, Henan Tourism has firmly grasped the core of "culture" and deeply integrated it with tourism projects. This eye-catching and money-making approach has made cultural tourism in various places realize that "integration of culture and tourism" has become one of the core logics of the next stage of cultural tourism development.

2. Film and tourism are linked, and the city becomes popular

Henan Tourism's practice of using high-quality content to strengthen its "cultural" positioning is not the first of its kind. Before this, there were many examples of using video content to help tourist destinations become popular, but past cases had higher requirements for content.

For example, American director Woody Allen's "Midnight in Barcelona" combines Spain's Gaudi architecture, abstract paintings, romantic Mediterranean sunshine, breeze, wine, poetry, and the passion and unrestrainedness of the Spanish people; "Midnight in Paris" connects the poetic midnight Paris, Paris in the rain, Versailles, the place where Monet painted water lilies, and many bars that are inexhaustible and inspiring to artists. Woody Allen integrates love and urban aesthetics. After watching Woody Allen's movies, it is easy to fall in love with a city.

In recent years, the popularity of domestic film and television dramas has also brought similar novel experiences to the local cultural tourism market. The hit of "Where the Wind Goes" has pushed Yunnan Province to the top of the 2023 Spring Festival tourism market, and "The Long Season" has made Northeast China "unforgettable" in people's hearts. "The Silent Truth" has deepened people's impression of Chongqing as a "cyber city"; "Flowers" has made Shanghai's Huanghe Road synonymous with "prosperity". It can be said that the integration of "video content + cultural tourism" not only shows the unique charm of the city in a localized manner, but also strengthens this impression through the addition of story imagination.

The example of the integration of video content and cultural tourism to form a specific industry is pilgrimage. "Pilgrimage" comes from the field of the second dimension. Simply put, it refers to the behavior of people visiting the actual scenes that have been integrated into animation, comics, movies and other works.

Japan has gained huge economic benefits by attracting countless anime fans to "pilgrimage". For example, the 2016 animated film "Your Name" directed by Makoto Shinkai became a global hit, and the background filming location of Gifu City in Japan also attracted "pilgrims" from all over the world, bringing nearly 25.3 billion yen (about 1.36 billion yuan) in economic income to the local area.

Compared with the industrial development of "pilgrimage" in Japan, although "pilgrimage" is still a personal behavior of fans in China, many netizens on Xiaohongshu checked in at the Regent Hotel in Stephen Chow's movie "From Beijing with Love" when traveling in Hong Kong, and some fans made a special trip to Ya'an, Sichuan to check in at "Xiao Quanwang's home" after the hit of "Cosmic Exploration Editorial Department". At the same time, based on the huge base of Chinese Internet users, the topic of "pilgrimage" has been discussed on a small scale in China. On the Douyin platform, the number of views of the topic of "pilgrimage" has reached 280 million. After the TV series "Kuang Ling" became popular, the number of views of the Douyin platform topic "Check in at the filming location of Kuang Ling in Jiangmen, Guangdong" also reached 190 million.

In the current media environment, the obvious revelation that domestic cultural tourism can get from the "pilgrimage to holy places" is that the popularity and traffic brought by popular IPs are enough to promote offline consumption behavior. Using short video content to spread and explore localized scenic spots is also a proactive development strategy.

However, even if emerging media such as short video platforms can make it easier for local cultural tourism to "break the circle", to truly realize the industrialization of "pilgrimage to holy places", it is still necessary to face the difficulties in content production. Unless there is a more efficient means: low production cost, short production cycle, large content volume, and wide coverage.

Since 2023, short dramas have continued to be popular. At the beginning of this year, the Douyin account "Geng Tiaotiao" released the "I'm in Siming" series, which combined the "adventures of migrant workers" with the local cultural and tourism elements of Xiamen. The 10 episodes of the short drama have been played more than 11.92 million times, with an average of more than 16,000 likes per episode. In the comment section, many viewers were attracted by the scenes in the drama and expressed their desire to travel to Xiamen.

Today, the popularity of short dramas reflects to a certain extent that people's tolerance for video content is increasing and the corresponding content production threshold is decreasing. In other words, the domestic cultural and tourism industry may have found a new solution to localize the "pilgrimage to the holy land".

3. Can short plays drive new growth in cultural tourism?

The reason why short plays can become a new content outlet in 2023 is essentially because they play the advantages of both production and dissemination in the current media environment. This is also a low-cost and high-efficiency dissemination tool for the cultural and tourism industry that tries to convert online traffic into offline traffic through content.

In terms of content, the dramatic structure of skits usually throws up suspense first, and the plot development has strong conflicts and reversals, and strong emotional drive, which can quickly attract attention. The relatively complete story and dramatic performance can appropriately show the local cultural characteristics and be interesting. Therefore, when "skit content" is spread on social networks, it can often quickly attract attention and be widely spread.

For example, during the live broadcast of the Sanxingdui archaeological excavation, the official also used short videos to let the cultural relics speak in dialect, made emoticons, and used Internet buzzwords such as "blind box opening" and "new products" instead of "cultural relics unearthed" to adapt to the Internet context and achieve effective interaction with the audience, making the Sanxingdui, which has been dormant for thousands of years, a "top streamer". This model can avoid the shortcomings of conventional short videos that are highly homogeneous and unable to narrate; compared with conventional film and television works, it has a shorter production cycle and lower costs, and has the potential to quickly amplify the value of the IP of tourist destinations and enrich the content of cultural and tourism IP.

The advantages of short drama content in dissemination are more obvious. Last year, the short drama "Escape from the British Museum" used cultural relics to connect historical, background, and story content and implant them into the video, which not only provided new creative soil for traditional cultural creation, but also strengthened the emotional connection with the audience. Moreover, due to its short and fast form, it was quickly updated on major platforms, frequently created hot spots, and obtained traffic assistance from algorithm recommendations, maximizing the reach and influence on users.

For cities with insufficient resources, short drama content is also a form of communication that uses lower costs to create and amplify the city's characteristics. Compared with conventional film and television works, short dramas have a shorter production cycle, lower costs, and lower entry barriers. Compared with short videos, their story-bearing capacity and creative space are broader, and they can better meet the needs of cultural and tourism communication with depth, quality, and content.

In addition, the rapid development of digital technologies such as 5G, AI, and AR also provides technical support for the contentization and digitalization of cultural and tourism experiences from the perspective of technology supply. While converting online content to offline consumption, it uses rich content presentation forms to enhance the cultural and tourism experience and seize the "incredible wealth" brought by online content traffic.

For example, the large-scale virtual reality theater "Searching for the Goddess of Luo River" launched by Henan Culture and Tourism features situational creativity, immersive experience, and high-tech multi-dimensional presentation. Players use VR wearable devices to play the characters in the play, riding in a carriage on the outskirts of the "God's Capital", firing "crossbows" through the handles to engage in fierce battles with the enemy along the way; riding on a giant flying kite that soars straight up, fighting with the enemy thousands of miles in the sky. With the help of technology, cultural tourism can be experienced and immersive.

So far, we can see that "short drama + cultural tourism" actually connects the local tourism industry to the content production link, transforming the previous business model that relied on offline passenger flow into a business model of "first competing for online traffic and then converting it into offline passenger flow." Therefore, it also tests the local cultural tourism's aesthetic ability for content and its ability to adapt to the media environment.

For the short drama industry, the next stage of development is undoubtedly to get rid of the negative impression of low cost and small production by developing high-quality content. However, as a content carrier with huge communication value in the current media environment, finding new value soil from horizontal cross-border is also a promising development direction.

Author: Chuxia WeChat public account: Jingzhe Research Institute