Apartments.com had recently found itself on the very cusp of going from challenger brand to industry leader, but still didn’t quite own the rental space in people’s minds – yet.
Our goal was simple: to cement their leadership position as the undisputed go-to for renters looking for a new apartment. We would consider this goal achieved based on three metrics: unaided brand awareness, visits to the Apartments.com site, and overall leads.
To achieve this aim of making Apartments.com the first and only destination in renters’ minds, we would need to go full chest-thumping mode across media platforms, letting viewers, users, and listeners know that Apartments.com now had more rental listings than anyone else, and was, emphatically, the most popular place to find a place.
In our TV executions, we took the notion of a tech visionary and forward-thinking company to a ridiculous place, namely the Apartments.com headquarters. It is here that we find Apartments.com’s fictitious and loquacious visionary/leader Brad Bellflower (Jeff Goldblum) and his employee devotees. Each one willing to do whatever it takes to hold the #1 position, even if that means scouring a dystopian future for listings, creating a workplace menagerie, or embarking on a restless and robotic drive for efficiency.
Throughout these spots, we approached Apartments.com’s position as number-one as a foregone and matter-of-fact reality, undisputed, with a lot of proof and a little chicanery to back it up.
For the digital and social components of the campaign, Brad took on a more intimate tone, making use of his own idiosyncrasies and those of each platform. No visual trick was off-limits, from forcing perspectives to impersonating cute animals to interviewing cute animals.
Each execution was created to be simple and direct, to catch eyeballs and nudge their owners to make the move they’ve been dreaming of. Our Streaming audio, without the benefit of those same eyeballs, took full advantage of each listener’s mind’s eye, giving aural virtual tours of the prospective amenities that could easily be found on Apartments.com.
Was the campaign a success? Depends on who you talk to. But if you were to talk to those keeping track of metrics, numbers, and the like, they would say it was a resounding success. Not only did unaided consideration reach a historic new peak for the brand, but so did visits to the site, and total leads, outpacing the previous high-water mark by 30%.
