Wanderlab, Tripadvisor's in-house content creator and advertising agency, turned a year old last month, and there's no telling what its future holds.
And that is by design.
The Wanderlab team, which now numbers 40, celebrated both its first year and its multiple campaigns. The studio has its sights set on a future with new and different ways of delivering messages for clients, said Adam Ochman, global head of Wanderlab. And what that might look like, he said, "changes daily, on purpose."
Wanderlab is already working in a number of spaces it plans to focus on going forward. One is video.
"We want to have a much bigger presence in long-form and broadcast-quality video, whether that's on the streamers or a network, or becoming a development house," Ochman said.
Wanderlab already created a six-episode series on Prime Video, "The Wanderer," which it created in conjunction with tourism bodies in Abu Dhabi, Turkiye, Orlando and Morocco. It follows travelers as they explore destinations relying on locals and Tripadvisor reviews to curate experiences.
It was designed, Ochman said, to inspire viewers to dream about travel.
"'The Wanderer' has been an unbelievable success for us," he said. "We just hit 2 million minutes streamed, which was -- I felt like we needed to pop a bottle of Champagne for that one."
Outside of video, Ochman said Wanderlab is also quietly playing in some nascent digital realms. They include the metaverse, still in its early stages and where virtual and augmented reality interact, and Web3, considered to be the next phase of the Internet but more open and secure because it is built on blockchain technology.
In November, Wanderlab will work with an unnamed travel partner to bring a "multisensory experience" to London, an experience Ochman said would effectively bring "our travel partner's destination to life in London." He called it a step forward for the agency in the experiential world.
One of Wanderlab's major campaigns in its first year focused on augmented reality, done in conjunction with the San Diego Tourism Authority. The studio had San Diego artists create three murals in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. By scanning a QR code on the mural, pedestrians would find themselves in a digital environment promoting the Southern California city with interactive components.
It was well received, Ochman said, with more than 3 million passersby, 120,000 lens opens and interactions, 1.3 million page views on the site and 62 million impressions for the campaign.
Wanderlab continues to experiment with different methods of delivery. Social media is, of course, among them, in addition to the more nascent technologies.
"That's the beauty about acting as an incubator, to a degree," Ochman said. "We get to test and we get to try things out, and then we see what sticks. Then we roll it out across the globe."