The pandemic’s impact on the world’s most talked about cities

For over a year many of us have only been able to consume the cities we love online. The content has often been jarring: packed cities leaving us uncomfortable or the awkwardness of abandoned centres. The question is what this means for city brands, and what are cities doing to respond to maintain long-term investment trajectories, short-term tourism flows, and medium term talent waves? Many cities around the world, shut off from the outside but feeling the pain of a global pandemic have seen a dramatic shift in politics, refocusing strongly towards internal market dynamics and local needs. For those marketing their cities, this realignment may create significant opportunities to improve the urban experience, but won’t come easily given legacy strategies to establish particular images in target markets. London, for example, has limited experience on targeting residents.

Perhaps data can provide some useful clues to navigate the challenging choices that will need to be made as cities reimagine, reboot and, in some cases, repurpose what they are for. This draws on 2020 data from an ongoing ING Media study tracking the world’s top 250 cities for mentions on online news and social media across various platforms and languages.

There are three important findings to keep in mind.

The first is that a country’s share of digital visibility across its cities strongly correlates to country GDP. Cities with fewer absolute mentions will likely generate less investment. (The next step is to test whether adding network reach or shape alongside digital visibility may provide an even stronger indicator of a city’s investment potential.)

Second, global city rankings – which influence choices about where to invest, live, travel or study – and digital visibility converge over time. It appears both are strategic for consolidating a city’s profile. Many of the world’s leading rankings were also paused during 2020 or have not yet been updated to fully respond to the impact of the pandemic so digital visibility’s importance as a key data point may be amplified in the short term.

Third, cities that leverage either national or regional networks tend to outperform cities that do not. Any pivot towards local markets could be a strategic opportunity to build relationships with cities closer to home provided there is strategic overlap in content and networks.

So what about the pandemic?

The graph below shows Wuhan in pink and Minneapolis in red. These trend profiles give an indication of how two of the biggest stories of 2020 played out. The start of the pandemic lead to a spike in Wuhan, but not substantially above the average top trend for cities around the world shown in the dotted line. The tragic murder of George Floyd, however, resulted in one of the highest trend multiples we have seen in our data to date. (Only the Beirut explosion, at over 90X, was higher.) In a year of little live activity, it was one of the few networked events across cities globally other than the pandemic.

Zooming in, we can see that the average trend for 2020 at 7.2X the daily norm was only slightly above 2019. While the gap is small, it gives us a clue that as we move out of lockdown cities may have more potential to share their stories, as the entry point to conversations is generally lower and live programming is more likely to gain attention.

Wuhan experimented with this idea quite early into the pandemic. The picture on the left was released by China’s state news agency on 16 July 2020 featuring lots of people enjoying a water park to signal the city's rapid recovery. It took a month after testing the idea to find a higher quality set of images for the story to gain traction globally. The BBC story on the right is from 18 August 2020.

What we also saw last year was that Tokyo, New York City, London, and Paris saw almost no relative movement in their digital visibility. This pause is not universal and recovery may allow a strategic window for more nimble cities to consolidate advantage, especially if these cities are able to connect more directly with local populations to generate content.

This lack of movement in a year of significant growth in digital tools may be due to the pandemic's disproportionate impact on major centres. In London, for example, social media mentions declined 20% in 2020, while news was almost flat. The pandemic also saturated conversations around London – taking up more than 40% of trending topics during March and April last year. (By comparison, Brexit and a national election in December 2019 barely breached 8%.) Like many major cities, the pandemic saw a dramatic contraction in outlets to share its story.

This pattern is not unique to COVID-19 and may help explain why tragic events do not necessarily result in an overall uplift to digital visibility – in 2019 the fire at Notre Dame cathedral resulted in a contraction of overall mentions around Paris despite a short-term spike. It seems major events may temporarily reduce the capacity for a city to tell different stories, effectively crowding out other ways of knowing a place. Diversifying content away from COVID-19 and growing locally generated user generated content will become increasingly important to ensure cities are not overtly tied to the pandemic, and to increase capacity to pitch non-pandemic stories. While there are few examples of cities doing this, New Zealand’s travelling under the social influence campaign is a good example of a place brand trying to engineer a mix of coverage and user generated content.

The power of networks

However, perhaps one of the most strategic aspects of strong recovery for cities lies in leveraging networks. This is especially the case as competition becomes more dynamic: in the short-term cities will see increased competition from the countryside. Messaging the benefits of urban living may be a key opportunity for cities to cooperate.

The diagram below visualizes the global network penetration of cities. While London is certainly not the loudest city globally (Tokyo and NYC have more absolute mentions), it is able to consistently touch conversations outside London more than any other city. While Paris has significant reach too, almost any city in the UK, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, or indeed most of the world, will benefit when partnering with London. London, and those working to keep it one of the most important communications centers for cities globally, may want to mention London as the world's curatorial capital more strongly.?

Analysing city networks relative to peers may help cities establish networks based on strategic overlap or to support diversification. This diagram identifies global network penetration for London, Delhi, Dubai, Frankfurt, Liverpool, Barcelona, Lyon, Rotterdam, Birmingham, Helsinki, Vilnius, Sheffield, Baku, and Cape Town. These cities were represented at an event where this data was first shared*.

The language of cities

English is by far the top language for conversations around cities, while the United States is the most important producer of content about cities. However, the pandemic has accelerated a shift to other languages and locations, and we can expect more cities to diversify their approaches to content. For example, limited quality content on cities in Arabic may present a strategic opportunity for most cities.

One in four cities has more of their story told by other cities than locally, which, despite a lack of travel, increased during the pandemic. Eleven cities – Wuhan, Lima, Vancouver, Luxembourg City, Shenzhen, Singapore, Brasilia, Seattle, Honolulu, Las Vegas, and Cape Town –?saw this particularly. Wuhan is no surprise given the global nature of the COVID-19 discussion, but some of these cities benefit from significant local media production and may need to consider if this can be better leveraged.

Conversations around cities

Global trend distribution across the main topics from last year shows some important changes. Culture, Politics and Sport all shrank while COVID-19, Protest and Fake News grew. While the coverage of protest activity may make 2020 appear more turbulent, this is partly because it was of the only mass, live activity in cities; live sport normally takes up a bigger percentage of the pie. The overall result was cities generally had less opportunity to positively impact conversations around them despite protest actions highlighting cities as the place where innovation and reform generally takes place.

For example, this graph shows Washington D.C.'s visibility profile. Black Lives Matter and the MAGA march around the elections made up almost a quarter of the city’s annual visibility.

While climate conversations tend to not trend, 2020 saw cities continue to consolidate messaging around climate. In the run-up to Glasgow hosting COP26 we can expect more cities to strategically align themselves around climate conversations and find more creative ways to get their messaging out. The diagram shows climate conversation shares for Helsinki, Copenhagen, Paris, Glasgow, London, Stockholm, Barcelona and Lyon. In the case of Paris, 26% of its overall measured conversation, which also includes culture, technology, business and talent, was about climate.

In many cases 2020 put the brakes on cities exporting culture. Seoul’s dramatic increase in its ability to create trending events in other cities during 2019 came to an abrupt holt last year with its K-pop bands less able to travel.

As a final comment on trends, some cities did find creative opportunities to impact conversations around COVID-19, for example, a pilot creating a heart-shaped flight path before landing with pandemic supplies in Reykjavik.

Should cities do anything differently?

The data suggests cities may benefit from rethinking their approach to brand building, at least in the short-term. Below are six reflections:

1. Invest in live and networked content to benefit from more accessible trending opportunities in the short term.
2. Encourage residents to generate more user generated content.
3. Use tourism marketing spend to tell a range of stories that messages internal needs, refreshes available images, and targets wider business objectives.
4. Benchmark targeting ambitions against existing network reach.
5. Build in experimentation to learn from shifting audience expectations.?
6. Diversify content away from the pandemic as it risks too many cities sounding the same and because there’s a lack of quality content on places.

What are cities doing differently?

The pandemic has already reshaped how cities promote tourism and investment. This is a summary for how communications and marketing leaders from over 20 cities are investing in recovery*.?

Targeting: A major shift towards resident campaigns (e.g. London) and talent attraction (Helsinki and and Dubai).

Social: Cape Town and Barcelona want to ensure they are good destinations for local residents too. Other priorities include health and wellbeing?(e.g. Exeter and Baku), using SDGs to channel investment (Lyon) and food security (Dubai). In many instances, cities are rebalancing communications efforts to have a greater local, national or regional focus. This may impact outreach to markets like the USA and China.

Events: Frankfurt?is investing in data centres and logistics to offset trade fair cancellations, while cities with major events like Glasgow (COP26), Dubai (Expo2020) and Rotterdam (Eurovision)?are using more digital tools and investing in data analytics.

Future of work: Smaller cities (Bournemouth) and regions with a range of urban centres (West Midlands) are exploring how hybrid working can be messaged to attract businesses and talent. Cities are also investing in competitiveness by strategically co-locating sectors (Liverpool) and highlighting how their unique urban contexts are key to innovation (Barcelona and Rotterdam).

Investment: Cities are investing in a range of new initiatives, including exploring resource pooling (Bradford) and campaigns to boost consumer confidence (Sheffield). However, more traditional initiatives to develop place brands are still being advanced (Dundee).

Politics: Key Cities and Core Cities UK, two of the UK's three most important city networks, are investing in research, content and communications to position cities as the drivers of post-pandemic recovery and to impact national urban policy.

_____________________________________________

*This text is adapted from The pandemic’s impact on the world's most talked about cities , an event I coordinated for ING Media on 29 April 2021. Cities and places represented included: Azerbaijan Tourism Board, Barcelona, Bradford, Brand Lithuania, Cape Town Tourism, Core Cities UK, Dubai Land Department, Dundee, Exeter, FrankfurtRheinMain GmbH, Helsinki Marketing, Invest Aberdeen, Invest Glasgow, Invest in Lyon, Japan Local Government Centre, Key Cities UK, Kirklees, Lancaster, London & Partners, Marketing Liverpool, Norwich, Rotterdam Partners, Southampton, Sheffield, West Midlands Growth Company, and Wolverhampton.

?