Hasta La Creative!

When it comes to purchasing a home, you want it to be somewhere you’ll feel comfortable to be yourself. For its new digital campaign, Trulia takes that to the extreme, showcasing people at home doing the strange stuff people only do when they’re home alone.

Trulia tapped Mekanism in San Francisco for three 30-second digital spots, released today, slated to run into the fall.

“You’re a different person than you are in public,” said Michael Grant, creative lead for Mekanism. “Once we started diving into those stories, we realized they were pretty weird and fun and that everybody has one. That’s why we wanted to run and tell these stories. There is some absolute truth in all of the spots.” 

Mekanism also created a microsite for the brand, which targets home buyers in the 25- to 40-year-old range. The site features the ads as well as a set of confessional videos where consumers reveal their own strange at-home habits. 

Trulia is running a sweepstakes—also on the microsite—where consumers have the chance to win $25,000 to help them buy a new home. 

Check out the ads and credits below:

CREDITS

Agency: Mekanism 
CEO/President: Jason Harris
ECD: Brian L. Perkins
Sr. Copywriter: Michael Grant
Executive Producer: Kati Haberstock
Sr. Producer: Danielle Soper
Sr. Digital Producer: Andrew Devansky
Managing Director: Michael Zlatoper
Director Brand Management: Laura Szu-Tu

Video Production Credits
Production Company: Tool of North America
EP: Lori Stonebraker
Producer: Kelly King
Director: Shawn Z
Director of Photography: Chris Mably
Production Design: Jesson Moen

Editorial Company: Beast Editorial – SF
Post Producer: Vickie Sornsilp
Editor: Brian Lagerhausen
Assistant Editor: Nick Haynes
Colorist: Steve McEuen
Visual Effects Artist: Greg Gilmore
Music Composition: Andrew Duncan
Audio Post Facility:  M Squared Productions
Audio Engineer:  Mark Pitchford
Assistant Audio Engineer:  Phil Lantz
Sound Design:  Mark Pitchford

Jeff Goldblum, who’s enjoying something of a renaissance as a pitchman, has scored another gig in a peculiar role as a futurist for Apartments.com—helping to introduce the company’s advanced, perhaps even futuristic new apartment-listings website.

In the campaign from RPA, Goldblum plays Brad Bellflower, an eccentric Silicon Valley maverick who’s pretty damn impressed by everything on the new Apartments.com, which includes “custom search filters, videos, and most of all, heart.”

The launch spot, which broke Sunday on The Walking Dead, shows Bellflower in a black void, surrounded by flashing white shapes, as he mutters futuristically about “game changers,” of which the new Apartments.com is clearly one.

It’s both parody and not-parody, which at first makes it hard to understand what to believe, though by the end of the :60 it’s clear Bellflower loves Apartments.com, and you should too, though maybe not quite as cosmically.

“Change your apartment. Change the world” is the tagline.

“Like any good Silicon Valley maverick, Brad’s vision for his apartment-listing website is nothing less than to change the world. But hyperbole and parody aside, finding a great place to live or moving to a new area really does change your world,” says Andrew C. Florance, founder and CEO of CoStar Group,parent company of Apartments.com.

Check out some out-of-home work from campaign below, plus credits. The company plans to spend $100 million on advertising, media, b-to-b marketing and search in the campaign.

CREDITS
Client: CoStar Group
Spot: “Launch”
First air: 3/1/15

Agency: RPA
Executive Vice President, Chief Creative Officer: Joe Baratelli
Senior Vice President, Group Creative Director: Pat Mendelson
Creative Director, Art Director: Hobart Birmingham
Creative Director, Copywriter: Perrin Anderson
Associate Creative Director, Art Director: Kirk Williams
Associate Creative Director, Copywriter: Eric Haugen
Senior Vice President, Chief Production Officer: Gary Paticoff
Vice President, Executive Producer: Selena Pizarro
Producer: Joshua Herbstman
Agency Assistant Producer: Grace Wang

Production: Anonymous Content
Director: Tim Godsall
Director of Photography: Bryan Newman
Executive Producers: Eric Stern, Rick Jarjoura
Executive Producer, Production: SueEllen Clair
Line Producer: Brady Vant Hull
Production Supervisor: Timothy Kreis

Editorial: Cut+Run
Managing Director: Michelle Eskin
Executive Producer: Carr Schilling
Head of Production: Amburr Farls
Editor: Steve Gandolfi
Assistant Editor: Sean Fazende

Finishing: Jogger Studios
Creative Director: David Parker

Visual Effects: Framestore
Senior Executive Producer: James Razzall
Producer: Andrew McLintock
Design Director: Sharon Lock
Computer Graphics Artist: Mike Bain
2-D Supervisor, 2-D Lead: Michael Ralla

Audio Post Company: Lime Studios
Executive Producer: Jessica Locke
Sound Engineer: Dave Wagg

Transfer: Company 3
Executive Producer: Rhubie Jovanov
Producer: Alexis Guajardo
Colorist: Sean Coleman

Music Company: Barking Owl
Head of Production: Whitney Fromholtz
Creative Director: Kelly Bayett

Talent: Jeff Goldblum

—Out-of-Home Credits
Agency: RPA
Executive Vice President, Chief Creative Officer: Joe Baratelli
Senior Vice President, Group Creative Director: Pat Mendelson
Creative Director, Art: Hobart Birmingham
Creative Director, Copy: Perrin Anderson
Associate Creative Director, Art: Kirk Williams
Associate Creative Director, Copy: Eric Haugen
Senior Copywriter: David Sullivan (for Living Near Burritos, Duck and Finding an Apartment Faster only)
Senior Art Director: Rob Anton (for Living Near Burritos, Duck and Finding an Apartment Faster only)
Photographer: Michael Muller
Digital Artist: Art Machine

—Digital Credits
Agency: RPA
Executive Vice President, Chief Creative Officer: Joe Baratelli
Senior Vice President, Group Creative Director: Pat Mendelson
Creative Director, Art: Hobart Birmingham
Creative Director, Copy: Perrin Anderson
Associate Creative Director, Art: Kirk Williams
Associate Creative Director, Copy: Eric Haugen
Junior Art Director: Josh McCrary
Junior Copywriter: Earl Lee
Photographer: Michael Muller
Digital Artist: Art Machine

Real-estate companies love haunted-house pranks. We saw it earlier this year with this gotcha video from Denmark. And now, digital real-estate brand Trulia is embracing scare tactics with its own hidden-camera prank for Halloween.

Trulia, with help from Olson Engage, held a haunted open house—inviting people in to see a property that was rigged up to mimic paranormal activity. Check out the video below to see the amusing reactions—capped off by the sudden appearance of a dead grandma in a bed. (This place won’t be on House Hunters anytime soon.)

Trulia has done a few other things for Halloween this year, including updating the local maps on its website to show the most likely spots to find zombies, vampires and ghosts (using its existing data on things like cemeteries). It also created the “Housing Scare Report” infographic below, which shows, among other data, the kinds of things that scare people off from buying particular houses—like having “666” in the address or knowing about a previous death in the home.

Click the infographic to enlarge.

Re/Max's first ads since it went public are here, and they're Zooey Deschanel-grade quirky.

Four new spots by Leo Burnett in Chicago, which the 40-year-old company tapped in August, feature eager people looking for their dream homes and Re/Max agents guiding them to something even better—though in a different way—than what they'd imagined.

The tagline is, "Dream with your eyes open," but one spot puts it best: "With a Re/Max agent, you'll see how much better than a dream home the right home can be."

While the ads have an odd (and vaguely annoying) rhyming pattern in the voiceover, there's something endearing about the heart of the message. Re/Max is pitting expectations against reality, and trying to show that sometimes the reality can be better.

Credits below.

CREDITS
Client: Re/Max
Agency: Leo Burnett/Lapiz USA
Ad or Campaign: “Dream With Your Eyes Open”
Executive Creative Director: Laurence Klinger
Creative Director: Manuel Torres
Associate Creative Director, Art Director: Flavio Pina
Associate Creative Director, Copywriter: Lizette Morazzani
Executive Producer: Ken Gilberg
Producer: Mariana Perin
Senior Music Producer: Chris Clark
Executive Vice President, Director of Planning: Wells Davis
Vice President, Strategy Director: Howard Laubscher
Strategy Director: Felipe Cabrera
Executive Vice President, Account Director: Richard Roche
Vice President, Account Director: Ernesto Adduci
Account Supervisor: Sara Abadi
Account Executive: Spencer Colvin
Production Company, Visual Effects: MPC
Directors: Paul O’Shea, Dan Marsh
Executive Producer: Asher Edwards
Line Producer: Zak Thornborough
Post Producer: Diana De Vries

Sometimes, the combination of creative talent and too much free time can lead to some truly odd projects. Case in point: designer Phil Jones, who has been replacing realtor ads around town with his own meticulously reproduced photos.

Using wigs and wardrobe changes, Jones reenacted each realtor's pose as closely as he could, then pasted the results over the original images on benches around Minneapolis.

While it could (accurately) be described as vandalism, the project's rapid explosion in popularity since Jones posted it on Reddit is also helping to bring national attention to a few local real estate agents with modest ad budgets.

Yes, he's truly offering a service—helping to drive record traffic to their websites … their crappy, crappy, crappy websites.

As if putting Walter White's house on the market a few weeks back for Breaking Bad's finale weren't enough, Century 21 and Mullen return with five fun videos that channel the Halloween spirit.

The clips take place in a "slightly haunted" house and were actually shot in a single day in the home of Mullen group cd Tim Cawley, who wrote and directed the campaign. (He's quite the boo-ster of scary movies, with two horror shorts to his credit).

In one clip, "Master Suite," a claw reaches out from beneath a bed, grabs a pair of slippers and devours them. Another video, "Playroom," features a toy box with a ghostly inhabitant. Household items—chairs, doors, shoes, candle holders—move by themselves in several clips, including "Pet Friendly," which stars Duke, Cawley's Great Dane puppy, who looks cute enough to charm any poltergeist.

At the end of each vignette, on-screen copy—"Yeah, we could sell it"—assures us that even though the place has some slight supernaturally issues, Century 21 is up to the challenge. No Realtors are shown. Guess they would've scared prospects away.

Check out all the clips after the jump.

In a familiar move that most businesses are doing now, advertising premiums have shifted towards the growing popularity of online advertising. Century 21, known for making effective advertising programs to carve its niche has made such a move with the hopes of retaining its market position in the real estate sales industry and hopefully tapping a new market that they never had before.

“With 84 percent of consumers shopping for a home online, according to the National Association of REALTORS®, we are confident that increased online advertising will benefit our brokers, agents and most importantly, the consumer.”

Such is a good tactic if traditional advertising has been failing to deliver. Perhaps other companies may want to study that niche as well.

(Source) RIS Media