industries

Forming Designs On Digital

By Tony Wanless /

Tourism Vancouver and creative agency smashLAB’s win of an international award for digital marketing shows the depth of this city’s creative talent.

Local travel advocate Tourism has scored many a coup with its way-out-there marketing (bringing the Olympics to Vancouver –now that was a Big Idea?).

Now, it’s scored another coup by being named platinum winner for digital marketing excellence by the Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International in New York this week. HSMAI noted that Tourism Vancouver and other category winners “exemplified” innovation.

Tourism Vancouver’s entry was a an eye-catching new iPad app developed for the organization by Vancouver creative agency smashLAB, which also designed a knockout new website for the Vancouver Aquarium last year.   

The Visit Vancouver application (https://bit.ly/WdAZ3Q) uses digital tours, photos and video, alongside hotel information to help prospective visitors plan their stay in Vancouver. Upon arriving, visitors can use it to find local cuisine, scan event listings, and discover unique activities.

 
Already, users have given Visit Vancouver a 4.5 star rating in Apple’s App Store.

The application pulls content from Tourism Vancouver’s CMS and CRM, stores data for offline access, and integrates with hotel reservation and ticket purchasing systems. It does this by using various custom APIs and data feeds.

But this is all in the background. Suffice to say the app offers a highly visual and intuitive user interface that makes us look like an exciting fun city. 

Prospective visitors can download it for free and then use it to make the most of their trip to Vancouver.
smashLAB’s latest digital design win further indicates  how much Vancouver is becoming a digital design centre. 
 
While everyone worries about losses in the film and games industries, they don’t realize that the other use for digital design — marketing and advertising — is growing fast and that Vancouver is well known player in it.