AirAsia lets Malaysians choose where travel show hosts go by voting on Facebook Live

UPDATE [3/10/17]: You’ve watched them spin fire in Cebu, eat Satan chicken in Lombok, and fight warriors with sticks. AirAsia’s super creative way of showcasing our amazing, bestest region indawholeworld, Southeast Asia, through a Facebook Live travel show was genius! You guys got the chance to vote for what you wanted to watch travel hosts Natalie and Denise do and you really knew how to pick ’em… making them eat crickets and drink venom, eek!

Sadly the show is over, but do you know how difficult it is to record the whole thing live?? Pretty darn hard. We wrote about some of the challenges they faced, like weather and internet connection. Read on if you wanna know more, or watch it for yourself in their wrap up video below:

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Travel shows always try to make you feel as if you were there, but in reality we know we’re all just watching it on a screen, potato-ing on our couch in house rags, eating stale chips. And we all know that regular travel shows are also heavily scripted, in spite of the host ooh-ing and ahh-ing at everything (oh plz la, we know you’ve practiced a million times and thrown out a gazillion takes!).

But what if we told you there is a travel show that puts YOU in charge of the action? A show that makes you feel as if you’re really there in an exotic new country and you get to call the shots, as if you were the one travelling instead of being a passive viewer? 

AirAsia has released its live interactive travel series, Adventure Live, where two hosts, Natalie Kniese and Denise Chan, travelled to six Southeast Asian cities in six weeks… but the exciting (and sometimes stomach-churning) part is that they had to do everything the audience chose for them. 😀 Walking Dead game, anyone?

Natalie and Denise’s live adventure kicked off in Hanoi, Vietnam on 16 June, before making their way to Cebu, Philippines (23 June), Yangon, Myanmar (30 June), Lombok, Indonesia (7 July), Phnom Penh, Cambodia (14 July), and finally Luang Prabang, Laos (21 July). Actually the series is part of the airline’s ‘Live Life Unexpected’ campaign, in conjunction with Visit Asean@50 (a year-long campaign celebrating ASEAN‘s 50th birthday).

But seriously, the audience gets to choose where they want the host to go and what to do?? Finally, that’s a show we’d Tune into. 😉 partly because it would be fun to torture the host also 😛 😛

And they really had to do some cray stuff like spin fire and eat Satan chicken! 😯

Since the series was live-streamed on Facebook, Malaysians could vote using FB emojis as they watched the video, to select one of the two options given to Natalie and Denise and build their adventures, hehe. You get the idea how it’s supposed to work, right? Fun to have that kind of power, eh? Well, not so much for poor Nat coz one of the first things she had to do was drink a snake wine shot in Hanoi!! Basically it’s a snake preserved in wine. GULP.

“I am normally a pretty adventurous traveller – except when it comes to food. I will go to all lengths to see a waterfall or a building just to be able to have said that I have seen it in real life! But, I am not an adventurous eater. So Adventure Live taught me that it’s OK to try something new like snake venom and a fried cricket. I wouldn’t do it again but at least I tried! – Natalie

Denise on the other hand had a palate as adventurous as her feet. Her adventure began in Lombok, Indonesia where she first had to fire up her stomach eating Taliwang chicken setan that’s evilly spicy, that’s why it’s called setan. She also had to eat a scorpion in Phnom Penh, which turned out to be ok actually, because it tasted like a juicy prawn.

“Eating scorpions at Phnom Penh, Cambodia was my favourite! I even got to try the rest of the creepy-crawlies off camera (tarantula, frog, silk worms). I discovered that I quite enjoy the taste of fried crickets!” – Denise

Six-legged street snacks aside, our mouths watered when Denise and Natalie got to try other delicious local food. Our favourite was seafood in Cebu, pickled papayas from the Minister of Papaya (who is like a local mini celeb), we’d also like to nom Katy Peri’s pizza, and heck we wouldn’t mind some of that Satan chicken though we’d probably need Gaviscon for the burn after. After our experience with Chilli Rush chicken, we can’t be too careful. For desserts, the mak fak (pumpkin sweet) looks good, then we’d wash it down with Vietnamese coffee and rosella sorbet from Luang Prabang if we had been there, yum yum.

By allowing viewers to choose each adventure, it also showcased unique features of the countries they’re visiting. We saw Natalie learning arnis which is stickfighting, chinlon (it’s a lil like sepak takraw) in Yangon, which Malaysia had won its first gold medal in at the 2017 SEA Games. Then we saw an amak tempengus dance in Lombok, performed by the court jester to entertain the sultan. They even highlighted upcoming events such as the Luang Prabang Film Festival, which you can check out if you’re going there in December.

Throughout the show, Natalie and Denise also read shoutouts from the audience who were commenting live from all over the world, interjected with tips for flying such as getting travel insurance.

Best of all, at the end of each episode, the hosts had 50,000 Big points to give away to two lucky winners to do ANYWHERE in Southeast Asia. All the viewers had to do was answer some simple questions like these:

The videos are online now, click here for the Natalie’s adventures in Hanoi, Cebu and Yangon, and here for Denise’s adventures in Lombok, Phnom Penh and Luang Prabang. It’s a real workout! Even we feel like panting watching them run around.

Seriously, doing a live show is HARD WORK! Here’s how they did it…

To film this, AirAsia brought in Malaysian film company We are KIX. You can see the team following Natalie around as they did the background stuff, which normally production companies would do with computers. But as they were filming live, there was no editing. Everything had to be on the spot, so they relied on their creativity and props for ‘special effects’.

The funniest one was countdown boy, who who took off layer after layer of t-shirts that had numbers on it to show the countdown, as Denise and Natalie waited for the audience to choose their adventures. In other episodes, he tossed frisbees with numbers, removed Vietnamese rice hats, and twirled hula hoops. There was one episode where the whole crew did star jumps to count down.

So how did they come up with the idea of shooting a live travel show? Director of We are KIX, Ion Furjanic related that one night, he saw a bunch of people hosting live videos on Instagram and Facebook, just talking in selfie mode to the people watching. That’s when the light bulb turned on.

“But in that moment, I saw a crazy possibility. What if you could use it to show people new places and new experiences and they were in control of the whole thing? What if you could make this interactive video look and sound amazing? I brought the idea to the team at KIX the next morning, and AdventureLive! was born by lunchtime.” – Ion Furjanic, Director of We are KIX

Overall, the planning took about 2 months of prop making, test shooting, scripting and research (yes, there has to be some scripting after all you can’t just pull stuff out of your buntut), related Ion, but after 10 to 15 times it became muscle memory. But of course it wasn’t all smooth sailing. For the KIX team, their biggest challenge was making sure they had 4G. Most of their first few days in each city were spent walking around, yelling, “3 BARS LTE!”…”2 BARS 3G!” 😆

Then there was unpredictability of the weather and traffic. If you noticed in the Lombok episode it was very windy. According to the KIX team, it was one of the hardest moments of their entire adventure coz an hour before they were set to go live with horses, martial artists and drummers ready, the rain poured down. They all huddled under a tarp on the side of the mountain.

It’s interesting to see how businesses are using tech to reach out to more consumers

Facebook Live or any other live streaming technology isn’t new anymore, but it’s interesting to see businesses tapping into it, coming up with bigger, bolder, and more ambitious projects, like Adventure Live. After all, there is a huge market on social media they CANNOT afford to lose.

Some cool campaigns we’ve seen are this live workout video from Kohl; Dunkin Donuts’ concert broadcast on Spotify, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Vine, Facebook and Periscope; and a pitbull puppy adoption drive by ASPCA, where walkers in bright orange shirts and the dogs in orange handkerchiefs walked all around New York City. Heck, CILISOS also tried out FB live when the boss wasn’t in. 😛 Even celebs are in on it, Dwayne The Rock Johnson, Kevin Hart, Gordon Ramsay, etc.

As intimidating as streaming live might seem, it’s an opportunity to engage with followers with real time reactions, comments and viewer numbers. Plus, FB newsfeed prioritizes live videos, so this is better than any old post. Businesses can do A LOT with live streaming. From factory tours, seminars and tutorials, Q&As, launching new products, customer service, contests, or just bursting a watermelon with rubber bands!