Home First, Destination Second

Amsterdam: Home First, Destination Second

Target Audience: Locals and Tourists

Project Partners: Camille Nastiuk, Alexandra Gonzalez, and Diana Morimoto

My Part: I created the video for the project and helped with research.

Campaign Objectives:

• Promote slow tourism (visiting in the off-season, shopping local, taking care of the land)

• Emphasize taking care of the city as people call the city home

Rationale: “Home First” (tagline: “Home first, destination second”) promotes slow tourism and a city revamp by suggesting off-season travel times in less populated areas and emphasizing trash pickup for both locals and tourists. The goal of this campaign is to relieve residents and city workers of some of the economic and social pressures of overtourism and pollution by maintaining steadier levels of visitors and street cleanliness.

The two major IAE ethics codes that the campaign focuses on are commercial relationships and social responsibility. Because the campaign redirects tourists away from overpopulated areas, some businesses may see a slight slowdown in customer volume during high-tourism months (June through August). The city must work closely with various businesses, informing them that while they may see a slowdown in the summer, there will be a steadier, more consistent inflow of tourism throughout the year. We call on the public’s social responsibility to keep the public spaces clean, regardless of whether the trash they see is theirs or not.

Our hardest call has been determining the target audience and focus of our campaign. The photos and footage we collected have been of trash in the area and picturesque landscapes. We started with the goal of creating a video and map of the city to focus on the litter and overpopulated tourist hotspots. However, after visiting the city center, we learned that much of the litter is a local problem rather than a tourist one. Our campaign is a reminder that a lack of spatial awareness, in terms of travel and trash, is a detriment to everyone, both locals and tourists.

The original draft of our campaign included an idea for a map of local businesses that tourists could visit to support the local economy and remove economic pressure from overpopulated areas. However, as we collected photos and videos from our time in Amsterdam, we realized that as tourists ourselves, much of our campaign content would be of major tourist hotspot areas. Moreover, some local businesses that receive less tourist traffic may not appreciate a campaign that announces their location on such a public scale. Thus, we worked to ensure our campaign would be able to incorporate the visual content we collected, without donning an artificial perspective of an Amsterdam local.

*Rationale Written by Diana Morimoto