INTRODUCTION
“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 uplifting 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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

BRAND BUILDING
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
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

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

EPILOGUE
From redlining to modern urban planning, you don’t have to look far to see ways in which maps have been used to marginalize, divide and oppress Black communities across the United States and around the world. Far from being passive to this phenomenon, Black cartographers have a long, but seldom-discussed history of counter-mapping. From W. E. B. Dubois’ turn-of-the-century map-based visualizations of Black prosperity, to Victor Green’s “Green Book” travel guides and beyond, these maps have served as acts of resistance, and windows into how power is distributed, by whom, and what might be revealed by other ways of looking at the world.

We hope this project helps travelers see the country in a way that prioritizes and celebrates the contributions of the Black community, while facilitating travel choices that deepen engagement and stimulate economic activity.




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