When you’re moving, you’re so beset by cardboard boxes that your life might as well be made of them. And now, Century 21’s new ad campaign actually is.
The new stop-motion campaign from Mullen uses cardboard cutouts to tell three stories about the travails of relocation. In the first ad, an emo cardboard kid in a red cap gets all broke up when his cardboard dad tells him they’re moving from one cardboard house to a bigger cardboard house. Luckily, there’s a cardboard real estate broker with a sunny yellow scarf to introduce the kid to another kid, with a blue cap.
In the second spot, a Century 21 agent saves the day by showing an elderly man who’s just moved to the city that there’s a nearby park where he can go hang out with the birds, without having to worrying about his lovely wife driving her boat of a car into the bushes.
The third spot manages a sideways dig at the enemy of real estate brokers everywhere—Craigslist—labeled not entirely inaccurately here as Creepslist. But the yellow-garnished hero helps a young single woman meet the rather fantastical criteria of a place that’s not infested by rats and has a roof with a view of red-hatted water towers (apparently enough to make the young woman cry).
The visuals, hand-cut by artist Elizabeth Corkery, are plenty endearing—simple without being boring, with nice, minimal use of color to highlight the emotional subtext. It also helps that the scenarios are all reasonably credible, and that moving, in general, really does suck. Then again, it’s all just part of modern life on this little spinning cardboard planet we call Earth (twee soundtracks not included).
