The World's Most Talked About Cities
The World's Most Talked About Cities
ING’s year-long study into digital visibility ranks the world’s most talked about cities. Tokyo dominates, followed by New York City, London and Paris. One in every five online mentions for the World’s Top 250 cities are about these four cities, cementing their positions as the world’s super brands. But what does it all mean?
Tokyo is the word’s most talked about city, generating as much digital visibility as the bottom 150 cities the ING Global Cities Digital Visibility Series.
ING Global Cities Digital Visibility Series
ING’s investigation into The World’s Most Talked About Cities covered 751 cities in 168 countries included in a diverse set of 24 publicly available global city rankings. From this we extracted samples for Europe’s, The UK’s and The USA’s Most Talked About Cities. Our most ambitious sample reorders the world’s Top 250 cities appearing on city indices by their digital visibility. Armed with this new data, we’re more able to start assessing how digital visibility is impacting on cities as brands, and to identify cities that may have hidden potential or aren’t making the most of leading positions. To provide a snapshot of what people are talking about in each city, ING also segmented for conversation topic shares, looking at the breakdown for culture, technology, business, liveability and talent.
““In a globally competitive world, visibility matters to cities today more than ever before. Yet beyond a handful of key cities we know little about their brand potential. Measuring their digital visibility provides a clearer insight into how cities and major towns perform as brands compared to their regional and global peers.””
Ranking cities
Our urban world has rankings for almost everything. Have you left school and want to know which city to live or study in? Nestpick has you covered, especially if you’re keen on cities in North America and Europe, where many rankings concentrate their focus. Or there is QS which provides data on the best cities for students based on university rankings, affordability, diversity, job opportunism and vibe. Prefer travel as your form of education? Lonely Planet’s curated top cities lists, Euromonitor’s index of international arrivals or MasterCard’s by nights and travel spend could unlock unexpected travel choices. Just be sure not to forget your visa. For those donning suits instead of swimsuits, countless innovation and business rankings can help identify a sweet spot for where to invest.
These helpful benchmarking reports tend to capture a range of ‘expert’ metrics as the primary source of a city’s brand performance and appeal. Like a postcard of a tropical beach with picture-perfect blue sea, they communicate a foretaste of a place. In a similar way, every time you or I take a photo of a new piece of real estate or describe our experience of walking down a vibrant street, we become co-producers of a place’s wider story. For many cities, user-generated content is the only entry point curious individuals may have when wanting to explore new places.
Could these conversations happening across social media and online news provide early signs of the rapid change that is happening in cities across the world? We don’t really know – there is little comparative research into the impact digital messaging is having on cities as brands. ING Media’s ongoing Global Cities Digital Visibility Series indicates that these conversations seem to matter, but establishing exactly how may take time. The USA, for example, is home to more talked about cities (based on their digital visibility) than any other country. During the same period, it also attracted more FDI than any other country. This doesn’t appear to be a coincidence. One of the top takeaways is that a country’s share of global GDP and the share of digital mentions for its cities are strongly correlated. The extent to which people are talking about a place seems a far stronger indicator of economic potential than sentiment. A bit more on this later.
Efficiency of visibility?
A country’s share of digital visibility is positively correlated with their share of global GDP, providing a far stronger indicator of economic potential than sentiment. The positive correlation between number of cities included and share of GDP is even higher, suggesting investing in Tier 2 cities may have a disproportionately greater economic benefit at a national level.
Then there’s that the world’s global financial capitals all seem to have a similar conversation pattern, with a strong pairing of people talking about talent and business. Despite NYC having far more mentions than London, they have practically the same topic segmentation.
The USA’s Most Talked About Cities ranks the US’s Top 40 cities by their share of the online conversation. As with the earlier European version, there is a strong correlation between city rankings and total online mentions – with over half the cities in each achieving the same result for both – suggesting online conversations impact on place branding. The same is true in the UK sample. At a global level, this positive correlation exists too. This is likely a consequence of a tendency to rank the places that are already visible, underlining that city brands take time and develop incrementally. In a globally competitive world, however, identifying value may require increasingly innovative benchmarking techniques, and looking deeper than the usual suspects.
The World’s Most Talked About Cities
An indicator of hidden value?
A handful of cities, for example, punch well above their weight by capturing a far greater share of the total conversation than their peers. Liverpool (even with a restriction keeping categories like football below 25 per cent of total mentions to ensure ‘sub brands’ didn’t cannibalise the city brand) jumped more than any other city, with a digital visibility ranking 196 places higher than its city ranking. These cities are of interest because they can provide the strongest indication that there may be activity that hasn’t been picked up in global rankings (and likely traditional news) yet. From a built environment investment point of view – these cities may have discount or early-mover advantages, or simply be the places where there is significant potential to accelerate their global standing.
In the European sample, which came out in March, we’re able to get a better sense of what these early signals could mean. Lyon’s digital visibility ranking is 23 places higher than its city ranking, the biggest jump in the European Top 40. The city has subsequently been recognised (alongside Helsinki) as the European Capital of Smart Tourism for its innovative use of technology in delivering the city’s tourism offer.
Technology also dominated what people were talking about, with 38% of the conversations referencing Lyon also mentioning tech. This suggests that the French government’s long-term strategy to promote Métropoles French Tech may be paying off (as may be the case with Nantes). Yet, governments around the world make use of industrial strategies to strategically promote areas for economic growth; these seldom lead to such a clear change in a place’s brand. Conversations may be a helpful tool in identifying where strategic leadership is impacting change.
Those marketing these cities may have significant communication assets that aren’t being fully leveraged. This presents an opportunity to climb the rankings by consistently improving the quality and impact of the conversations about them. At a global level, none of these cities perform strongly for more traditional news coverage, except Baghdad and Mecca, but benefit from huge amounts of user-generated content. Turin, which is 123rd for digital visibility is 10th overall for Facebook. More strategically capturing these conversations may have significant impact on real estate opportunities.
Baghdad’s proportionally higher visibility (even with conflict limited to 25 per cent of total mentions) highlights that history may still play an important role in the age of digital. Most of the cities estimated to have reached populations of one million people by 1000CE are in the Top 250 (Alexandria, Rome, Xian and Baghdad). All the cities achieving this milestone by 1500CE are in the Top 250 (Hangzhou, Nanjing and Beijing), perhaps highlighting the advantage of long-term incremental brand reinforcement.
Understanding how a diverse range of cities perform is central to understanding how measuring digital visibility at a global scale may help us identify patterns, recognise change and discover hidden value. Memphis (in the sample of US cities punching above its weight) concentrates conversations around talent, but with relatively lower business and technology shares. Cities (in Europe and the US) with higher business category shares tend to have higher talent shares too, suggesting Memphis’s recovery from the 2008 financial crisis may be ongoing. The US sample data also highlights a key aspect of its high worker productivity: the USA’s relatively high internal labour mobility may make the business/talent pairing less important than in other parts of the world. The flexibility talent has to move to opportunities is supported by the relative ease of buying and selling property, but an ageing society and possible future economic downturns may undermine this advantage. In future, US cities may need to work far harder to attract talent, which means investing heavily in education to generate more homegrown talent or developing the most favourable built environment for attracting it. The latter includes developing a strategic city narrative, increasingly important as the US tries to stop a decline in international traveller share.
At a global level, Liverpool’s relatively high talent and business conversation topic shares may suggest something interesting is happening in the city that may not otherwise be visible. Digital visibility may also make our assessment of cities a more nuanced: Baghdad, home to slightly fewer people than London, may have significant value to offer if the narrative of conflict is resolved. Perhaps most importantly, monitoring it may help us pinpoint where local and global change starts to impact – negatively or positively – on a city’s potential.
Liverpool jumped more than any other city, with a digital visibility ranking 196 places higher than its city ranking. These cities are of interest because they can provide the strongest indication that there may be activity that hasn’t been picked up in global rankings yet.
Digital profile potential
Cities and their futures are not static. Venice is still beautiful, but no longer commands global trade as it once did when it was the world’s printing capital. Today, book publishing is concentrated mostly in Chinese and American cities, although the European Union, when counted as a whole, publishes slightly more annually than both. This capacity to produce physical content follows the pattern of digital visibility.
Cities that haven’t consolidated their strong global ranking into digital visibility may find their positions challenged in future. Cites like Austin and Phoenix, for example, are far more recognisable in an English language-media context than in others, limiting their global digital visibility. Similarly, Sofia is less visible outside of Cyrillic alphabets, while some states, particularly those with Arabic writing systems, may have city and country names conflated depending on the translation. The relative translatability of a city’s brand across a range of global markets may have significant impact on its long-term investment potential. This is particularly relevant for targeting new growth markets.
Digital visibility data includes mentions in English, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, German, French, Malaysian, Indonesian, the city’s local language, and any other unique local variants. This provided a global snapshot, with these languages covering roughly 90 per cent of all the content produced online. Conversations only happening within one country can’t be considered to have global reach, so a control was added to ensure the local language didn’t make up all the mentions. Digital visibility aggregates mentions across all these languages, but interestingly, cities were more likely to record negative sentiment in Arabic mentions. This was across the entire world and including cities in the Middle East. Generating strategic content in Arabic could, therefore, be a key differentiator for some cities.
The cities with the most digital profile potential are the ones global city rankings highlight these as the places we should pay attention to, but this doesn’t necessarily translate to the digital world, where these cities attract fewer mentions than their peers. These cities, which have digital visibility rankings over a hundred places lower than on city indices, have the most potential to grow their digital profiles by building on their strengths. These cities tend to have relatively higher digital visibility on news, suggesting the opportunity to broaden content creation beyond traditional channels. Many benefit from capital city status, or are the de facto economic capital like Johannesburg (Africa’s highest performing on city rankings is 99 positions lower for digital visibility) and Ho Chi Minh City.
Interestingly, while all these cities also have comparatively lower mentions on social media relative to their peers, they outshine on one platform: Instagram. All these cities (except for Kuwait City) have proportionally higher mentions on Instagram, providing opportunity to elevate brand positioning through strategic storytelling. HCMC in 92nd place (digital visibility 182) has the largest jump. Extending these conversations onto social media could create powerful new opportunities for place branding that links digital visibility into a wider communication strategy. Real estate – old and new – and the wider built environment context could play an important in providing a backdrop for sharing city experiences that compel those who may never have considered a place feel like it was more accessible.
Importantly, digital visibility at this scale only investigates whether a conversation is taking place on a particular city and, if so, what are these conversations about. It is still difficult to use sentiment analysis on a truly global sample of languages. Sentiment scores were remarkably similar across the global sample, even for cities facing significant challenges. Lagos and London, for example, have the same score: slightly positive. Looking across the full sample indicates that sentiment is a poor indication of a place’s economic potential. A country’s share of digital visibility, however, is positively correlated with their share of global GDP, providing a far stronger indicator of economic potential than sentiment. The positive correlation between number of cities included and share of global GDP is even higher, suggesting investing in Tier 2 cities may have a disproportionately greater economic benefit at a national level. The gap between Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities doesn’t seem to matter nearly as much as having multiple cities represented, suggesting rebalancing economies may require strategically identifying specific places to increase their visibility within national and global contexts. Establishing media concentration in smaller cities is certainly an opportunity, however, news coverage only makes up 11 per cent of average mentions per city. The countries leveraging this the most are China and Germany where over a third of all mentions across many of their cities are from digital news. Chinese cities may benefit significantly from an opening up of social media, while Frankfurt’s global position may be more competitive if its share for news was closer to London and NYC’s.
“The World’s Most Talked About Cities begins to explore the links between places and digital conversations, and the impact this has on what we consider the best cities. Global benchmarks are just one of the communicative tools that put places on the map; digital visibility helps capture value that may otherwise go unnoticed .”
Distribution of visibility and invisibility
At this stage, it is a challenge to build a truly global picture of global visibility. There are over 50 countries with major cities that aren’t represented in The World’s Most Talked About Cities. This makes the USA’s dominance of digital visibility even the more apparent. China’s rise is clear in having the second most talked about cities globally, despite the inability to fully capture the conversations taking place in China. (This may be changing though: Guangzhou bucks the trend of many Chinese cities with strong visibility on Twitter.)
At a global level, European and North American cities may be over-presented when considering their population shares, while Africa and Asia, where 90% of future urban growth up to 2050 is expected to be concentrated, are under-represented. Lagos, Africa’s most visible city, and far higher than Johannesburg, the continent’s traditional entry point, suggests an inevitable shift may slowly be happening. Perhaps the swiftest opportunity lies in cities where digital visibility is lower investing in tighter networks with their neighbours. As London and Paris recently realised in their joint digital marketing campaign promoting them as one megacity, working together rather than focusing on competition can make it easier for tourists to decide to visit. Bookings on the Eurostar between the two cities by tourists went up 24 per cent. Some of it is simple maths: if Lagos talks about nearby cities like Accra and Abidjan, and they reciprocate, West Africa and their digital visibility increases; if Paris and London’s digital visibility is combined, it creates a super-contender to Tokyo and NYC. Big strategic rail projects privileging quick access between major centres may slowly start achieving this in other parts of the world.
Distribution of visibility and invisibility
The blue dots map the world’s Top 250 cities, indicating that digital visibility is most geographically concentrated in Europe. Red dots indicate the biggest city (if over 300,000 people) in 51 countries not represented by the Top 250. These are mostly in Africa, where (along with Asia) almost all urban and population growth is expected in coming decades. This growth has not necessarily impacted on visibility yet, leaving Africa’s urban centres at a distinct global disadvantage.
However, cities from the USA and China underperform in one key area: the global share of conversation per city. In this metric, the USA is 11th globally, followed by China at 31st. Japan’s share per city is four times greater than the US’s, while the UK and France, countries with a high number of cities represented in the ranking, come in at 8th and 9th. Tokyo also has higher digital visibility than New York City. Expect cities not consolidating their leads to be challenged as more and more cities find their digital voice. At a national level, increasing the number of cities able to compete for digital visibility, may be the most strategic option to maximise economic potential in a changing world. Another option may simply be developing global city rankings in more geographies, as Dubai has done, as a stepping stone to generating more strategic content on cities we may only just be discovering.
The full ranking of The World’s Most Talked About Cities is: Tokyo; New York City; London; Paris; Madrid; Dubai; Rome; Barcelona; Seoul; Osaka; Moscow; Istanbul; Hong Kong; Chicago; Los Angeles; Miami; Berlin; Singapore; Beijing; Milan; Delhi; Toronto; Shanghai; Las Vegas; Jakarta; Boston; Liverpool; San Francisco; São Paulo; Amsterdam; Manchester; Atlanta; Kyoto; Porto; Houston; Sydney; Bangkok; Mumbai; Brussels; Bogotá; Lagos; Buenos Aires; Dallas; Taipei; Nagoya; Caracas; Vienna; Tehran; Cairo; Lyon; Lima; Vancouver; Dublin; Detroit; San Diego; Philadelphia; Munich; Melbourne; Hamburg; Ankara; Prague; Birmingham; Manila; Seattle; Shenzhen; Lisbon; Mexico City; Frankfurt; Jerusalem; Portland; Montréal; Athens; Glasgow; Edinburgh; Rio de Janeiro; Helsinki; Doha; Geneva; Stockholm; Hanoi; Venice; Washington, D.C.; Pittsburgh; Karachi; Kiev; Tampa; Abu Dhabi; Warsaw; Kuala Lumpur; Chennai; Baku; Cape Town; Quito; Denver; Nashville; Cleveland; Lahore; Brasilia; Hangzhou; Baltimore; New Orleans; Ottawa; Mecca; Tallinn; Baghdad; Bristol; Tianjin; Budapest; Nantes; Bangalore; Zürich; Copenhagen; Marseille; Macau; San Juan; Monterrey; San Antonio; Leeds; Nairobi; Medellín; Nanjing; Turin; Valencia; Jeddah; Luxembourg City; Beirut; Hyderabad; Stuttgart; Belfast; Johannesburg; Chengdu; Cardiff; Sacramento; Columbus; Bordeaux; St. Petersburg; Naples; Oslo; Minneapolis; Calgary; Austin; The Hague; Guadalajara; Tel Aviv; Perth; Riyadh; Newcastle; Kolkata; Brisbane; Pune; Belgrade; Bilbao; Santiago; San Jose (California); Salvador; Rotterdam; Toulouse; Hannover; Chongqing; Milwaukee; Bologna; Qingdao; Düsseldorf; Curitiba; Adelaide; St. Louis; Lille; Nottingham; Auckland; Edmonton; Leipzig; Wellington; Minsk; Honolulu; Xian; Kansas City; Casablanca; Taichung; Amman; Santo Domingo; Ho Chi Minh City; Dhaka; Almaty; Ahmedabad; Kraków; Orlando; Basel; San José; Montpellier; Riga; Wuxi; Bern; Asunción; Florence; Porto Alegre; Antwerp; Montevideo; Gothenburg; Colombo; Bucharest; Belo Horizonte; Pretoria; Raleigh; Harbin; Zhuhai; Nuremberg; Dalian; Phoenix; Suzhou; Dakar; Guangzhou; Tunis; Panama City; Nice; Canberra; Ningbo; Zhengzhou; Cologne; La Paz; Tbilisi; Salt Lake City; Zagreb; Charlotte; Brno; Tirana; Novosibirsk; Vilnius; Sarajevo; Muscat; San Salvador; Bratislava; Seville; Alexandria; Abidjan; Kuwait City; Wuhan; Reykjavik; Algiers; Kinshasa; Eindhoven; Ljubljana; Phnom Penh; Yangon; Manama; Guatemala City; Graz; Addis Ababa; Christchurch; Sofia; Skopje; Luanda; Dar es Salaam; Douala; Shenyang.
Invisible cities are the biggest city (if over 300,000 people) in 51 countries not represented by the Top 250. They include: Accra; Antananarivo; Ashgabat; Asmara; Bamako; Bangui; Banjul; Bishkek; Bissau; Brazzaville; Bujumbura; Chişinău; Conakry; Cotonou; Damascus; Djibouti; Dushanbe; Freetown; Gaza; Harare; Havana; Juba; Kabul; Kampala; Kathmandu; Khartoum; Kigali; Kingston; Libreville; Lilongwe; Lomé; Lusaka; Managua; Maputo; Mogadishu; Monrovia; N'Djamena; Niamey; Nouakchott; Ouagadougou; Port Moresby; Port-au-Prince; Pyongyang; San Juan; Sana'a; Tashkent; Tegucigalpa; Tripoli; Ulaanbaatar; Vientiane; Windhoek; Yerevan.
If you would like to learn more about how ING Media works with cities email: cities@ING-media.com