The Smart Tourism Groups Already Leveraging the Pokémon Craze
Skift Take
Since people are already wandering city streets in search of Pokémons, tourism marketers are trying to guide them to local attractions where the little monsters are supposedly in abundance
With the Pokémon Go mobile game sweeping the nation, some agile tourism brands are tapping into the manic interest around the smartphone app to drive near record levels of engagement with their audiences.
Welcome to the Pokéconomy. According to SurveyMonkey, Pokémon Go is now the most popular mobile gaming platform ever in U.S. history, since launching less than two weeks ago on July 6.
Two of the first travel organizations to respond with Pokémon-themed promotions, Visit Anaheim and Travel Portland published new posts on Monday showing where visitors and locals can find Pokémons and PokéStops at local attractions.
Basically, the goal of the game is to catch digital gremlins (Pokémon) in the Google Maps-based app at specific places around a city (PokéStops), and compete with other gamers. For more info, read this Pokémon primer.
First, here are a few statistics:
Today, SurveyMonkey reported that 26 million Americans played Pokémon Go on Google Android and Apple iOS apps yesterday. The company said, "More people use the maps in Pokémon Go (which is powered by Google Maps) than Google Maps itself."
According to Gizmodo, "Pokémon Go has already been installed more times after a week than Tinder in five years."
According to SimilarWeb, "Pokémon Go now has more daily active users than Twitter."
The Pokémon phenomenon might not flare out soon. It was only available in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand for the first week. Due to server ca
