Tourism campaigns for under-traveled areas
The opportunity is not simply to send more people somewhere. It is to make the right reasons to visit easier to find, then make sure the value of that attention reaches the people and places already making the area worth visiting.
Working on a place that sits outside the usual route?
Countercult helps build the local research, campaign strategy, cultural partnerships, and visitor experiences behind a more specific reason to go.
Is this a niche?
Yes, and that is useful. “Tourism” is too broad to own, while “destination marketing” can sound like every other agency. Tourism campaigns for under-traveled areas names a real client problem: a place has something meaningful to offer, but it is not yet legible to the people who might visit, support, or partner with it.
The phrase also leaves room for different geographies. It can describe a rural region, a small town, a neighborhood outside a city centre, an island in the shoulder season, or a place whose culture is known locally but not yet easy for visitors to discover. The common thread is not remoteness. It is useful attention without flattening the place.
Start with the reason to go
A weak tourism campaign starts with a list of attractions and tries to make the destination look busier. A stronger one asks what a visitor could understand, feel, learn, or take part in here that they cannot get from a generic itinerary.
That reason might be a living craft, a local food route, an artist-led workshop, a community archive, a seasonal gathering, a landscape with a specific story, or a network of independent places that are already connected. The campaign should make that existing specificity easier to find. It should not invent a personality for the place from a moodboard.
What the work actually involves
- Local cultural research: map the people, practices, spaces, histories, and relationships that make the place distinct.
- Operator discovery: find the artists, producers, hosts, food projects, venues, archives, and independent businesses already doing the work.
- Campaign strategy: turn the research into a clear proposition, audience, story, channel plan, and public invitation.
- Paid commissions: give local people a real role in shaping the campaign, not only a quote, image, or borrowed aesthetic.
- Experiences and testing: build a small public programme or visitor experience that can be tested before a large campaign is rolled out.
- Responsible measurement: track who benefits, what capacity is created, and whether attention is useful to the place over time.
Attention is not the same as value
For an under-traveled area, a successful campaign may increase visits. It may also increase the length of a stay, spread demand beyond one landmark, create paid work for local operators, make a local archive discoverable, or help a tourism team stop guessing about the culture it is promoting.
Those outcomes need to be agreed before the creative work begins. Otherwise “success” defaults to reach and arrival numbers, even when the campaign creates pressure for the people it features or sends visitors to places that cannot absorb them.
The job is not to make a place look undiscovered. It is to make its existing value easier to find, understand, and support.
A better brief
Instead of asking an agency to make a quiet destination go viral, ask: what should the right visitor understand about this place, who should benefit from their attention, and what should still be here after the campaign ends?
That question creates room for cultural intelligence, local relationships, creative direction, and practical delivery. It also gives local partners something more honest to respond to than a request for “authenticity.”
Have a destination brief that needs more than a campaign wrapper?
Bring the geography, cultural question, audience, and constraints to Countercult Studios.
This piece was informed by Shona Neary’s writing, conversations, and thinking around independent culture, artists, and place.
editorial process: Our Journals are pulled from our writings over the years to get information out as quickly and as widely as possible, and to get to what matters: finding each other and claiming our seat in the circular economy. Some ideas overlap between Shona Neary's work on cultural infrastructure and their artist practice as Sketchy Shona. AI is a tool for infrastructure, not for creating Journal writing or artists' work. We welcome original reporting and pitches from journalists and independent publishers.