This research proposes the application of new technologies in tourism advertising to resonate with and respond to unconscious desires that are embodied within consumers. The ethnographic research first questions how consumers form their desires regarding tourism and illustrates that advertising does not create desire; consumer desires for travel, often embodied, exist before consumers are exposed to advertising messages. Such desires derive from past experiences, imagination and sensorial imageries learned from stimuli. Consumers react positively to multi-sensorial, empathetic messages. AI technologies, such as the convolutional neural network algorithm, can be used to apply traditional cultural symbols in art design (Lin 2021). Virtual mirror-based learning technology mirrors back to individuals their social network, identifying their most important contacts, influencers, and communication bottlenecks. The research aims to connect existing and future new technologies that provide the “posthuman mystic,” to offer consumers to experience a new level of their own being, giving room for different kinds of human relations--friendship, connection, and novelty --through one’s avatars (Bolger 2021) and to construct a “decentered, highly relational mode of reality giving agency to everyone, not only to all other humans, but to natural and technological subjects as well” (Delio 2020, p. 115). Such virtual world, with an example like the Metaverse, is “a combination of contextualization and wholemaking from the standpoint of posthumanism and mysticism” (Bolger 2021, p.768). The research then deciphers consumers’ positive reactions to websites that resonate with imagination sensorial desires, past experiences, desired activities and “LIVE” desires. Based on the findings, the research summarizes cross-disciplinary research of tourism advertising and new technologies 4.0 and conceptually illustrates how the applications of new technologies 4.0 may assist with the understanding of consumers’ multi-sensorial desires, imagination, and memories to design empathetic advertising messages. As such, advertisers may be in systematic dialogues with consumers and create multi-sensorial messages that resonate consumer desires.

• Yu Chen(State University of New York, Farmingdale, United States)