A marketing group’s approach to teaching young people about Israel
For most Americans, marketing is ever-present — whether it’s the bombardment of ads that crosses your path on a daily basis or the idolization of the people who do it (Don Draper is pretty handsome). Despite that (or, perhaps, because of it) 96% of consumers distrust advertising, according to a study commissioned by the American Association of Advertising Agencies in 2015. So how do you get people invested in a product?
That questions becomes even more difficult when what you’re selling comes with a lot of baggage — about 73 years’ worth. That’s the task that Joanna Landau, founder and CEO of Vibe Israel, took on when she decided it was time to give Israel — the whole country — an image boost.
“I didn’t see why people shouldn’t get excited about Israel like I get excited about Iceland or New York or any other place,” Landau said. “It’s a normal country, but it seemed to me that whenever anybody talked about it outside of Israel, it was always in the context of the conflict or being the Jewish homeland.”
Indeed, Landau had her work cut out for her; a 2019 study by the Pew Research Center found that 51% of Americans have an unfavorable view of the Israeli government. At the same time, though, she picked up on an important distinction: 64% of Americans have a favorable impression of Israeli people.
Her community, Landau explained, especially within the army during her service with the IDF, is what helped her make the decision to live in Israel for herself and what sparked her passion for getting others to interact with Israel positively. Her family is originally from England, and her parents made the choice to move to Israel when Landau was very young.
“I eventually made it my choice, rather than my parent’s choice, when I was in the army, so that was kind of what connected me to the country — really through the people and the diversity of the people,” she said.
In 2009, Landau founded Vibe Israel with the hope that her three children would eventually make the same choice to live in Israel.
Similarly, Becca Hurowitz, president and CEO of Vibe Israel U.S.A., felt that her connection to Israel was rooted in positive personal experiences.
“Israel has been a part of my life since I was 16 and I went on my first trip,” Hurowitz said. “I studied abroad there, and it has always been a source of connection to me.”
Hurowitz joined the organization in 2019 after serving as the mission director for the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburg in Pennsylvania. Through her work, she discovered that young Jewish people, in particular, have a troubled relationship with Israel that didn’t exist in previous generations.
“We realized that Jewish young adults don’t necessarily have a built-in connection to Israel that my generation, my parents’ generation and my grandparents’ generation had, and in fact, it’s even more challenging than that — they have a lot of questions, and the perception of Israel is not always a positive one,” she said.
Part of the problem, Landau suggested, is that young people aren’t getting messages about Israel outside of headlines about the conflict.
“We don’t appear on their feeds enough, and that’s how they get information these days,” Landau said.
That’s part of why Vibe Israel and Vibe Israel U.S.A. (which is tailored more to the Jewish community) are focusing on engaging people 40 years old and younger. Another reason is that young people tend to have less information about the country and its history overall, so there is a sizable opportunity to transform a lack of perception into a positive one.
“We’re looking at a huge swath of people in the middle who don’t have an opinion about Israel or just don’t feel that it’s relevant to them,” Hurowitz said. “We, in the Jewish community, believe that everyone has a thought about Israel or an opinion, good or bad, where as I find, particularly with the next generation, it’s much more ambivalent than negative.”
According to the Pew study, nearly half of American Democrats or Democratic leaners, a demographic that tends to include most younger people, do not sympathize with either Israel or Palestinians. That has to change, Hurowitz said, if Israel is to continue to be part of the Jewish identity. It’s also critical to sway non-Jewish young people, she said.
“Realistically, most young Jewish adults have a lot of non-Jewish friends, and the non-Jewish friends are going to take their cues from their Jewish friends,” Hurowitz said.
The model for Vibe Israel seems like a no-brainer now, but it was an experiment back in 2011. The organization invites influencers — in the early days, bloggers — on an all expense-paid trip to Israel. Each trip is themed to a particular group of influencers — foodies, for example.
“It could be food, and within food, it could be vegan food or pastries,” Landau explained. “It could be architecture; it could be education; it’s everything that isn’t what everybody else is doing.”
Before the pandemic, the organization was hosting seven to eight tours a year and had completed 45 in all. Within each group, Landau said, the reach of followers was at least one million and sometimes as high as 15 million. The point is not to explicitly advertise Israel as a place; it’s about steering people to positive experiences that make them love Israel on their own.
“Our belief is that if you want people to connect with Israel, first of all, put forward what Israel can offer them,” Landau said. “It’s much more a marketing approach than an advocacy approach, where you would put the talking points first, experience after. We put the experience first, and then we don’t actually create talking points, but though the experience, you have the language that you want to use.”
The first group that Vibe Israel invited was a group of European “Mommy Bloggers.” Landau didn’t expect that they would accept a trip from a marketing organization, but they were eager to come, she said. Since then, they have hosted fashion blogger Bryanboy, travel blogger Vicky Flip Flop and Australian trio SketchShe — and if you haven’t heard of them, don’t feel bad, Landau said.
“Online, you basically have hundreds if not thousands — if not tens of thousands — of huge communities that, if you are not interested in that particular area, you will never have heard of,” she said. “We believe that people connect with their own tribes, and social media and online platforms have enabled communities to gather around ares of interest. We introduce Israel to people through what they care about.”
Since the pandemic, Vibe Israel has had to come up with other ways to give people those positive experiences. They developed digital tools Vibe Live and Vibe Israel Academy to help partners talk about Israel through the right brand lens, and they’ve created what they call an “unboxing” experience, where people can find images an articles about Israel.
“We’re realizing that as the world is changing, even when we go back to in-person and travel reality, there will always be a strong virtual component,” Hurowitz said. “So we’ve created a virtual experience Israel platform that is designed specifically for the next generation, and it’s a combination of live videos and live hosting and gamification.”
The organization is also developing an app to house all of these developments, which they hope will also help engage the non-Jewish community.
“As an Israeli interested in getting awareness for my country, obviously, the much larger market is the non-Jewish world,” Landau said.
The pandemic has also introduced an added layer of necessity to boost Israel’s international image. Even though it has been one of the most aggressive countries in rolling out the vaccine — as of press time, the vaccinated population of Israel had exceeded 50% — Israel depends heavily on international tourism and business.
“Small countries like Israel … are really going to have to work much harder to show the world what they have to offer, because we are fully dependent on foreign direct investment and trade,” Landau said.
At the same time, though, Landau wants to make sure that non-Israelis appreciate the leisure side of things — and Israel’s warm and inviting community.
“We’re known as hard-working; we’re known as honest; we’re known as serious; we’re known as reliable. But we’re not known as fun — which we actually really are,” she said.
As for the conflict and the growing conversation around the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, Landau said that the marketing model naturally sidesteps the “elephant in the room.”
“More often than not, it’s the influencers themselves that don’t want to have that conversation on their feed,” she said. “It’s because they’re not here to promote Israel as a state; they’re here to showcase a topic that they care deeply about in another country.”
Landau and her team (which is all-female, by the way) once had to have a conversation about it with a visiting group, but she said that it was a process of listening to concerns and answering questions. Landau tries to provide resources when visiting influencers ask for them, she said, but ultimately, the conflict rarely obstructs the topic of the trip.
“In the non-Jewish world, interestingly, it’s not such a big deal,” Landau said. “The younger generation is hearing about the beaches and the food … the vibe is not a negative one. It’s a positive one.”
Looking ahead, Vibe Israel is planning another partner project with the President’s office, where they will set up an exhibit in the Tel Aviv airport about Israeli diversity. These kinds of experiences are what Landau calls communicating on the “people-to-people level.”
“Israel is always put inside some really serious, heavy, complex box if you’re Jewish,” Landau said. “This is not what our life is like at all.”
Hurowitz hopes that Vibe Israel U.S.A. will be able to change that message and establish a meaningful impression of Israel for young Jewish people in North America.
“It’s like Israel is a map on the wall of your Hebrew school classroom, but Israel is not,” Hurowitz said. “It is so much more. It is an actual place with living, breathing people who are interesting and dynamic and challenging and incredible.”
