“Maps are not ideologically neutral location guides. Mapmakers choose what to include and exclude, and how to display information to users.

These decisions can have far-reaching consequences.”* The same could be said for our industry’s use of data. All data is biased. Our responsibility is to locate and understand data biases, establish more deliberate and inclusive biases, then connect with our brands’ audiences in ways that make fewer assumptions about who they are and what they need.

The Black Elevation Map is transparent and purposeful about its biased use of data. The bias, in a way, is the story.

BLACK & ABROAD AT HOME Black & Abroad is among the world’s most prominent niche-audience travel brands. Known for its international trips to Latin America, Europe and Africa – and its provocative “Go Back To Africa” campaign – global shifts in the travel industry created an opportunity to focus on domestic travel.

With Black-owned businesses disproportionately affected by the pandemic (McKinsey), and the brand’s audience at the center of a retraumatizing conversation about systemic racism, we also saw an opportunity to provide ways for travellers to interact directly with America’s vast network of Black-owned businesses and cultural organizations.

BRIEF Activate Black & Abroad as an emerging domestic travel brand with an uplifting, tech-forward engagement platform.

OBJECTIVES Build the brand’s domestic travel credentials. Stimulate interest in Black-centered domestic travel. Create a cultural counterpoint to Black pain narratives.

INSIGHT When marginalized communities navigate the world, they're asked to do so using tools that prioritize someone else’s worldview. Change the tools, and you could change the experience.

IDEA: THE BLACK ELEVATION MAP An uplifting domestic travel utility for Black & Abroad that visualizes Black cultural data as elevation. The greater the density of data, the higher the elevation. See the heights of the culture at BlackElevationMap.com

DATA VISUALIZATION A visualization of +330,000,000 points of data, which, through exploration reveals insights about relative population distribution and where Black-owned businesses and cultural institutions are most likely to be present, absent, and in what abundance.

TRAVEL UTILITY Functionality includes the ability to geolocate, create “favorites” lists, “Add to map”, search, a freestyle explore mode, +30,000 discoverable points of interest, a Black-travel social feed, and integrates with other mapping platforms to facilitate routing and directions.

SCALE +330,000,000 points of data +28,000 Black-owned businesses +6,600 cultural sites +100 guides with a CMS built for ongoing administration “Add to map” for Black-owned business owners and organizations

THREE AUDIENCES Modern Black Travelers. Black-owned businesses and institutions. Allies.

TARGETING We ran two separate audience profiles, at two different phases of the launch: 1. Interest and signal-based lookalikes – a baseline audience built on interest and travel-intent behaviour (e.g., search) that expanded in real time to people who “looked like” those who engaged most. 2. High-Value Audience – an audience designed by Kinesso, based on academic trend research into Black culture, race-based data bias work, and leveraging the Acxiom data spine.

TOUCHPOINTS BlackElevationMap.com “A hymn away from home” launch film and cutdowns 27 individual business mini documentaries Geo-targeted, signal-triggered online media

VISUALIZING THE HEIGHTS The project is a crafted patchwork of interwoven data and technologies.

NATURAL ELEVATION A straight port of a global Digital Elevation Model (DEM) called NASADEM.

TOTAL & BLACK POPULATIONS Derived from a custom choropleth monochromatic visualization that uses census tract polygonal data for geographical units. Densities computed and visualized using quantile (equal count) categorization.

BLACK-OWNED BUSINESSES Elevation generated using an ad hoc point density visualization.

HMDB Data tagged “African-American” pulled from the Historical Marker Database. Visualization generated as above.

POINTS OF INTEREST CMS content and records from HMdb, combined with API data from Yelp! and Google, filtered for relevance to travel. Google Places ID used for standardization across sources. Rules for clustering and visibility by zoom level.

3D OVERLAY Mapbox GL web library with a custom WebGL renderer, wrapped in a custom React web app.

SEARCH Results from Mapbox service integrated to prioritize and differentiate project-specific records.

NEW WAYS OF SEEING From its Black-culture-centering international tours, to its representation-pushing online activity, Black & Abroad is known for using creativity and technology to challenge the way the world sees travel.

The Black Elevation Map is a choice to see America through a lens of joy and community.

CREATIVITY ON A CONTINUUM This project sits on a historical continuum of Black-led design and “counter-mapping” – a map-making practice interested in establishing and charting Black geographies at times when barriers to owning your space (disappropriation) could be as elusive as barriers to owning your body (slavery, lynching and incarceration).

ICONS & TYPE The project’s impactful headline font is “Martin”, and is based on Civil Rights protest posters.

The body copy is “Du Bois.” Both were created by American designer Tré Seals, also created the project’s original “points of interest” icon set, based on his survey of West African symbology.

INDUSTRY IMPACT This project continues the brand’s leadership in connecting sophisticated cultural ideas with sophisticated technological execution. It raises questions about how data biases construct the world around us.

How careful use of data can help, rather than harm the world. And it shows the value of placing a brand’s work within a historical continuum.

BRAND BUILDING RESULTS 116% brand lift (*Facebook Brand Lift Study) 647% greater campaign awareness than benchmark 45.4 MM in impressions across paid and earned channels

BUSINESS DRIVING METRICS 302% increase in traffic to BlackAndAbroad.com 360% increase in unique visitors 971% increase in event sales and site merch

AD PERFORMANCE 6x the average 2022 monthly YouTube campaign view rate +116% increase in ad recall, compared to control 33% beyond Facebook and Insta category benchmark for campaign awareness 293% exceeded benchmarks for key traffic clickthrough rate from digital media

DATA PERFORMANCE +330,000,000 total points of data +47,000,000 Black population data +28,000 Black-owned businesses listed +6,500 cultural markers +1,500 social sources across 53 embedded data feeds

PUBLIC RELATIONS “Turning heads and garnering plenty of attention online.” – Condé Nast Traveller “The Black Excellence Visual We've Needed” – Travel Noir

*“How Black cartographers put racism on the map of America” – Alderman & Inwood.