After posting a
maybe less-than-flattering video about Cleveland a few days ago, I'm pleased to say there is positive placecasting going on in the Forest City, too (seriously, that's an actual Cleveland nickname).
The
Cleveland Metroparks Zoo just announced its new cell phone audio tour is live and ready to take your call as you wait for that critter over there to wake up. Like most museum tours, it's not really a tour at all, just a series of sign posts telling you which number to punch into your phone. There are 33 stops at the moment (according to
this press release), though the medium is inherently expandable.
Though I'm not in Cleveland at the moment, I dialed the number while watching my own cat sleep. After a quick welcome and not-so-quick advertisement for a local cell phone company, I was asked to entering a stop number. I chose the numbers at random because I can't find a list of the stops anywhere -- including the zoo Web site, which makes no mention of the audio tour at all (but why should it if its meant to be listened to on-site?). The items I heard were
interesting, brief and specific to the animal or building at that location. Each tells a story -- why the animal is endangered, or how it is cared for by vets -- that was concise and didn't seem likely to duplicate the signs around the exhibit. One stop I heard even featured a zoo employee talking about her favorite memory of a given zoo building -- a nice, genuine touch.
My cat, by the way, remained asleep throughout.
The main presenter is a voice actor who is full of energy. But
my main beef with this project is that he seems to make up a new cartoonish voice for each stop along the way. I found most of these phony accents to be over-the-top and distracting from what were otherwise decent scripts with good information. Maybe these voices are meant to engage kids...but without any sort of character development (and who has time for that?), they just seem random and unnecessary.
Fortunately, most tracks invite feedback from the listener, telling them to press a button to leave just this kind of comment. This acknowledges the new and experimental nature of the project, and also made use of the dynamic possibilities of the cell phone medium, which got me thinking...
Cell phone tours have the obvious disadvantage of poor audio quality (compared to podcasts delivered on mp3 players) and air-time charges. But
they hold a distinct advantage in their ability to be updated quickly and universally. Indeed, the zoo's marketing manager, SueAllen, told the
Plain Dealer newspaper, "these can change on a daily basis." And you can understand why this is important to a zoo, where exhibits are changing all the time based on the weather and the health of the animals (this isn't so much a problem in art museums where the sculptures rarely have to visit the vet). A change to any stop on cell phone tour will be realized by every single visitor who calls the number after the change is made. In contrast, any site trying to dynamically update podcasts that users download ahead of time will face problems with all the "stale" versions already downloaded.
Another very slick feature of the Cleveland zoo cell phone tour is the option to see behind-the-scenes video. At stop number three, the narrator (in an inexplicably German accent) told me to press the * button to receive a text message link to a video of a gorilla getting an ultra sound. It worked like a charm. A few seconds later, I was watching a YouTube video of
this remarkable procedure on my iPhone. This is truly value-added content and the possibilities for placecasting are magnificent.
While I still think clear-crafted audio is the key to placecasting success,
optional video can allow visitors into places they'd never get to see otherwise.
Guide By Cell is the production company behind this project. It caters to non-profits and seems to have a lot of tricks up its sleeve.
If you know of other zoo audio tours, please let me know.
