Celebrating the Place’s values of Culture and Intangible Heritage
 Proud Past, Bright Future

With the implementation of the Rebel Alliance Empowering program, we can focus on the design and development of projects through Applied Cultural Diplomacy, with the help of Cultural Anthropology.

It is widely known that Applied Cultural Diplomacy (ACD) involves the application and implementation of the theories of Cultural Diplomacy and Soft Power, aiming to facilitate and improve relations and collaboration between disparate cultures.
We also see Cultural Diplomacy as a key factor in contributing to the development of Place Branding strategies that focus on the role of cultural heritage and intangible cultural elements as components of a nation's identity and image in tourism promotion. 
Cultural and location placement are our tools that can be adapted to various platforms and/or media.

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CULTURAL PLACEMENT
​Cultural Placement refers to any activity aimed at communicating and promoting the values of Intangible Cultural Heritage that characterize a place, region or nation in which those cultural forms are developed by the populations living in a particular geographical area.

Cultural Placement is part of the framework of the 2003 Convention promoted by UNESCO, aimed at safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Like in Location Placement, Cultural Placement takes shape in the so-called Product Placement and can be observed when the narrative structure of a Storytelling features representations of particular “Cultural Manifestations or Forms” capable of triggering in the audience the desire to deepen their knowledge, up to the point of arousing the desire to directly experience the Cultural Experience in the place where that particular Cultural Form is typical: the results obtained in terms of promotion of the territory are referred to as Film-Induced Tourism.

Examples of Cultural Phenomena represented in documentaries, films and audiovisual products are, for example, the Spanish "Encierro", the "Battle of the Oranges" in Ivrea, the "Palio" of Siena, and the "Carnival" of Rio de Janeiro: all forms of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

The UNESCO Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage of 2003 proposes five "sectors" where Intangible Cultural Heritage is mainly highlighted:
1. Oral Traditions and Expressions, including language as a vehicle of Intangible
    Cultural Heritage;
2. Performing Arts;
3. Social Practices, Rituals and Festive Events (and Religious);
4. Knowledge and Practices concerning Nature and the Universe;
5. Traditional Crafts.

The Domains of Intangible Cultural Heritage - © UNESCO Instances of Intangible Cultural Heritage are not limited to a single manifestation, and many include elements from multiple domains. Take, for example, a shamanic rite. This could involve traditional music and dance, prayers and chants, sacred clothing and objects, as well as ritual and ceremonial practices and acute awareness and knowledge of the natural world.
Similarly, festivals are complex expressions of Intangible Cultural Heritage that include singing, dancing, theater, celebrations, oral tradition and storytelling, exhibitions of crafts, particular sports, and other forms of entertainment.

The boundaries between these domains are extremely fluid and often vary from community to community, and from culture to culture. It is difficult, if not impossible, to impose rigid categories from the outside. While one culture may see their verses as a "form of ritual," another may interpret it as a simple song. Likewise, what one community defines as 'Theater,' another might interpret as a “Dance” in a different cultural context. There are also differences in scale and purpose: one community may make minute distinctions between variations of expression, while another ethnic group may consider all the different parts of a cultural phenomenon with a single module.

While the Convention establishes a framework for identifying forms of "Intangible Cultural Heritage," the list of domains it provides is intended to be inclusive rather than exclusive; therefore, the framework is not necessarily intended to be complete.

Member States may use a different system of domain classification. There is already a high degree of variability, with some nations dividing the manifestations of their Intangible Cultural Heritage differently, while others use domains very similar to those declared in the 2003 Convention but with alternative names.

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LOCATION PLACEMENT 
Location Placement refers to the promotion of a territory through its representation in audiovisual or multimedia works. Location Placement also activates the phenomenon of  Film Induced Tourism
Like Cultural Placement, Location Placement is a form of product placement, a mode of advertising communication of the territory, whose promotion in the past has used traditional channels, such as television commercials and billboards. Location Placement has effects on incoming tourism that push the audience of an audiovisual or multimedia work to want to directly know and visit the territory.

The presence of a territory in audiovisual works is therefore a tool that can integrate traditional communication and is particularly interesting at a time when consumers show increasing levels of saturation and opposition to television advertising. Its high effectiveness derives, in particular, from the fact that, compared to traditional advertising, this technique is immune to evasive practices (such as zapping) and to the attention decline caused by television advertising interruptions.
In addition, the message is conveyed through means (cinema, television, DVD, internet, etc.) that can reach a very large audience and with much lower costs than other equally effective media. From a technical point of view, communication of the territory through films or fiction can be framed as "hybrid messages", i.e., those forms of communication in which the public is unaware of the attempt at commercial influence and, consequently, decodes the message received differently than how it is used to do with commercial communications (Balasubramanian, 1994, p. 30).

Statistics report a significant increase in the number of tourists visiting locations used as film sets for movies, TV series, and other audiovisual productions such as documentaries.