The Wild Edit / 01.7
When Did We Stop Having Fun /On Safari?
9 Minute Read
As we close out 2025, our last edition of the Wild Edit for the year reflects on a question we have been asking ourselves a lot lately: When did safari get so serious? When did we all stop having fun?
There are scenes that plays out on almost every safari: a group erupts in spontaneous excitement over an unexpected sighting, a guide’s perfectly timed joke hits with precision or the energy in the vehicle shifts from quiet anticipation to pure exhilaration when something extraordinary begins to unfold. Most people who embark on a safari remember it being filled with laughter, joy and excitement. These moments are electric. They're also almost never part of the story the industry tells.
Instead, safari marketing has settled into a visual and verbal language so uniform, so carefully curated, that it has become nearly impossible to distinguish one brand from another. Words like "stillness," "reverence," and "connection" repeated with such frequency they've been drained of meaning. Everything is slow, everything is quiet, everything is profound. We covered this affliction in our previous piece on Creating A New Identity In The Age Of Marketing Fatigue, but we’ve asked ourselves: what are we forgetting? What are we leaving out? While safari certainly is life-changing, profound and meaningful, somewhere in the race to elevate the experience into something serious and sacred, the industry left the fun behind.
This matters more than it might seem. Because what's being marketed as a meditative retreat is, in lived reality, one of the most unpredictable, social, and genuinely exciting experiences available. Safari is full of energy and surprise. It's guides sharing their passion at sunrise, strangers becoming friends over sundowners, and the pure thrill of witnessing behavior most people only see in documentaries. It’s spontaneous, it's dynamic, and yes, it's deeply fun. But if someone only engaged with safari through its marketing, they'd never know that.
The question worth asking is: how did an experience this inherently joyful become so serious in translation? And more importantly, what is that seriousness costing the industry?
The Flattening of Luxury Storytelling
To understand where safari marketing has landed, it helps to zoom out and look at how luxury storytelling has evolved across other industries. For years, the blueprint was simple: beauty equals aspiration, aspiration equals desire. Show people something perfect and make them want it. This worked brilliantly for a long time. But as social media shifted from a place to admire carefully staged moments into a place where people go primarily to be entertained, that approach is losing its grip.
People are no longer opening Instagram to browse glossy catalogs. They're opening it to escape, to laugh, to follow along with something that feels alive. The platform has restructured itself around entertainment first, education second, and sales a distant third. Stories now matter more than static images. Personality outweighs perfection. And increasingly, the brands that thrive are the ones willing to experiment, to play, to build narratives that unfold over time rather than trying to close a sale in a single post.
The fashion world understood this shift early. Over the past few years, luxury fashion brands have quietly transformed themselves into entertainment studios. They're no longer just selling garments; they're building fictional universes, creating recurring characters, and releasing content in episodic arcs that audiences follow with genuine emotional investment. A handbag campaign becomes a short film. A new collection is introduced through a character who exists somewhere between reality and invention. There are plot twists, callbacks, inside jokes. It's bold, often strange, and occasionally fails spectacularly. But it works because it treats the audience like participants in an ongoing story rather than passive consumers of perfection.
Safari, meanwhile, has largely stayed put. The visual vocabulary hasn't changed meaningfully in a decade. The tone remains earnest, hushed, almost devotional. There's little energy, little surprise, and almost no sense that these brands see their guests as anything other than seekers of silence. The imagery is still beautiful, certainly. But beautiful imagery deployed in the same way, telling the same story, begins to feel like decoration rather than communication.
When Authenticity Becomes Aesthetic
Part of what's holding safari back is the industry's ongoing commitment to a particular version of authenticity. Every brand claims to be authentic. Every lodge is "genuine," every experience "unfiltered," every moment "real." The word has been repeated so often that it's lost all descriptive power. Authenticity in safari marketing has become less a practice and more a visual style: earthy tones, natural textures, no visible logos, strategic imperfection carefully composed. It's authenticity as branding, not as truth.
This wouldn't be a problem if it led to diverse expressions of what "real" means. But instead, it has produced a kind of homogeneity. Everyone is authentic in exactly the same way. The same color palettes, the same compositional choices, the same vocabulary of understatement. It's all so tasteful, so considered, so safe. And in that safety, something vital has been lost.
Real authenticity is messier. It includes the moments that don't photograph in the expected way, the excitement that doesn't fit into captions about stillness, the spontaneous detours and shared discoveries that make a trip memorable. Real authenticity would allow for energy, for enthusiasm, for the admission that not every sunset needs to be accompanied by existential reflection. But that kind of honesty requires risk. It requires letting go of a single, carefully controlled narrative. And right now, the industry seems far more interested in perfecting the aesthetic of authenticity than in actually being authentic.
The Tension Between Experience and Marketing
Here's the fundamental disconnect: safari, as a lived experience, is deeply social. Guests are brought together in a vehicle before dawn. They share reactions to everything they see. They develop rapport with their guide. They celebrate sightings together, commiserate over missed opportunities, experience genuine excitement at the sheer unpredictability of it all. They belly laugh collectively to the unexpected gurgling of an elephant passing gas. By the end of a safari, many people feel closer to their fellow travelers than they do to friends they've known for years. It's an intensely communal experience, full of energy and shared joy.
And yet, the marketing is nearly always solitary. A single figure gazing into the distance. One person, one moment, one carefully framed shot of private contemplation. The social dimension is almost entirely absent. So is the fun. Someone wouldn't know from most safari content that guests spend a significant portion of their time in genuine excitement. That guides are passionate and engaging. That the experience is as much about human connection and shared discovery as it is about wildlife.
This is where the industry has confused gravitas with meaning. There's an assumption that to be taken seriously, safari must present itself seriously. That luxury requires a certain solemnity. That fun, quirkiness or humor somehow cheapens the experience. But this logic doesn't hold. Safari can be profound and exciting. It can be transformational and deeply enjoyable. These qualities aren't in opposition; they're part of the same fabric. And the refusal to show that full spectrum isn't making safari seem more meaningful. It's making it seem… stuffy and boring.
What Fashion Knows That Safari Doesn't
The luxury fashion world has always been on the forefront of the next wave of high-end marketing, in part because fashion has always been more comfortable with creative risk. A fashion campaign doesn't need to follow expected formulas to be effective. It can invent a world, populate it with characters, and trust the audience to engage with it as a creative act rather than a documentary one.
What fashion brands have figured out is that creative bravery and beautiful imagery aren't mutually exclusive. The photography can still be stunning. The visual standards can remain high. But those elements can be deployed in service of something more dynamic, more surprising, more entertaining. You can have recurring characters who are real people, but present them through a narrative lens that gives audiences someone to follow. You can build episodic arcs around actual or fictional events. You can use energy, personality, and playfulness without sacrificing visual excellence. The framework becomes more creative, but the foundation remains real and the imagery remains strong.
This is the leap safari hasn't made. There's a fear, perhaps, that introducing any element of off-beat creative storytelling or character-driven narrative will undermine credibility. That it will feel manufactured or inauthentic. But this anxiety misunderstands what audiences are actually looking for. People don't need every piece of content to follow the same reverent template. They're perfectly capable of engaging with stories that are shaped, embellished, or creatively framed, as long as those stories are compelling and entertaining.
Safari has all the raw material for this kind of storytelling. Guides who return season after season, each with distinct personalities and areas of expertise. Wildlife individuals that guests come to recognize and care about. The cyclical nature of seasons, migrations, births. The unpredictable drama of predator and prey. It's a world rich with characters, plot, and stakes. The imagery is already there, already beautiful. The only thing missing is the willingness to use it in a braver, more varied way.
The Cost of Playing It Safe
In a landscape where every brand looks and sounds the same, differentiation becomes nearly impossible. And when differentiation is impossible, competition defaults to price, scale, or the single variable no one can sustain: being first. The camp that's slightly more remote. The guide who saw the leopard slightly earlier. The angle that's slightly more exclusive. It's an exhausting race with no finish line.
The alternative is to compete on creativity. To be willing to sound different, look different, take narrative risks. To accept that not every experiment will succeed, but that failing interestingly is more valuable than succeeding predictably. The brands that will stand out in the next decade won't be the ones doing everything correctly; they'll be the ones bold enough to do things differently.
This doesn't mean abandoning what makes safari special. The wildlife, the landscapes, the expertise of guides, the careful stewardship of wild places. All of that remains central. And it doesn't mean abandoning beautiful imagery or high-value content. It means expanding the emotional range of how those elements are presented. It means allowing for excitement, for spontaneity, for the energetic, joyful, social reality of what actually happens on safari. It means treating guests as people who are there to have fun, not just to bear witness.
Fiction as a Path to Truth
One of the most interesting developments in luxury storytelling is the rise of creative frameworks that somehow feel more honest than traditional marketing. A fashion brand creates a character who doesn't exist but whose taste and choices feel vivid and real. A start-up builds an entire fictional town populated by recurring personalities. These aren't attempts to deceive; they're invitations to play. And audiences respond because the creativity involved signals something real about the brand behind it: a willingness to take risks, a sense of personality, an understanding that engagement is more valuable than admiration.
This is storytelling that respects the intelligence of the audience. It doesn't pretend to be something other than what it is. It acknowledges the frame, the artifice, the creative choices involved. And in doing so, it becomes more honest than content that pretends to be unmediated reality while actually being just as constructed. The difference is that one approach is willing to be interesting, while the other prioritizes appearing serious.
Making Room for Joy
Perhaps the simplest version of this argument is that safari marketing should reflect what safari actually feels like: joy. Not in a shallow, frivolous sense, but in the deep, energizing way that comes from being surprised, from connecting with strangers, from witnessing something extraordinary and immediately wanting to share it. It's the joy of early mornings and anticipation and someone spotting something no one else saw. It's the joy of shared excitement and genuine awe and the particular satisfaction of a guide answering a complex question with passion and precision.
None of this shows up in the current visual language of safari. Instead, we get serenity. Contemplation. A person alone with their thoughts, presumably having a profound internal experience. And while those moments certainly exist, they're a fraction of what's actually happening. By focusing so exclusively on the meditative qualities of safari, the industry has created a gap between expectation and reality. People arrive anticipating silence and solitude and are often surprised to discover how social, how energetic, how genuinely fun the whole thing is.
Closing that gap doesn't require making safari less meaningful. It requires acknowledging that meaning can coexist with excitement. That transformation can happen in the company of others. That the profound and the playful aren't opposing forces but different notes in the same experience. And it requires being brave enough to use beautiful imagery in service of a more dynamic, honest story.
The Opportunity Ahead
The brands that will define the next era of safari won't be the ones with the most pristine imagery or the most remote locations. They'll be the ones willing to experiment with tone, to test new narrative structures, to fail occasionally in public, and to follow what genuinely resonates rather than what feels safe. They'll be the ones that understand social media as an entertainment platform first and adjust their creative approach accordingly. They'll be the ones that let their guides be characters, their camps be stages, and their guests be participants in an ongoing story. And they'll be the ones brave enough to deploy their considerable visual resources in unexpected, engaging ways.
This is already happening in small pockets of the industry. A guide with a genuinely engaging social media presence. A camp that isn't afraid to show the energy behind the scenes. A brand that treats its content less like advertising and more like episodic entertainment. These experiments are worth watching, not because they're perfect, but because they're trying something new.
The safari industry has spent the past decade perfecting a visual language that, at this point, everyone speaks fluently. The imagery is beautiful. The language is refined. But the result is a category that looks stunning yet feels flat. Emotionally remote. Interchangeable. The opportunity now belongs to the brands willing to remember what safari is actually like: unpredictable, social, energizing, and more fun than almost anything else people can experience. Maybe it's time the industry started telling that story.
Connect with us at hello@creativewildstudio.com if you feel ready to do something different in 2026.
