From Cinematic Myth to Visual Stabilisation: A Cross Media Analysis of Contemporary Destination Branding

Abstract

This study examines how destination meaning is produced and maintained across media formats in contemporary tourism branding. Focusing on Istanbul’s 2025 “Istanbul Vibe” campaign, it explores the relationship between a promotional film and the visual content of the official destination website. The study adopts a qualitative multi-method design combining semiological analysis of the promotional film with systematic content analysis of 112 images from the “Istanbul Bucket List” section. The semiological findings indicate that the film constructs an affective and symbolic narrative through cinematic sequencing, contrast, and multimodal orchestration. Urban connectivity and cosmopolitanism are foregrounded through infrastructural and atmospheric imagery, while heritage is integrated into contemporary urban rhythms. Gastronomy is represented through the juxtaposition of refined dining and informal street food, reinforcing a broader narrative of cultural hybridity. Typographic anchorage further guides interpretation towards mood, rhythm, and lifestyle as defining elements of destination identity. The content analysis shows that the website performs a stabilising role by translating symbolic meanings into structured and repeatable experience categories. The image corpus is organised around recurring domains such as culture, heritage, recreation, and urban life, with a strong emphasis on outdoor settings, human presence, and activity-based representations. The findings reveal a coordinated cross-media configuration in which cinematic representation intensifies meaning, while digital imagery stabilises it through repetition and categorisation. Destination coherence emerges through the alignment of narrative intensity and experiential structuring rather than identical visual reproduction across platforms.