Making bold moves in real estate marketing, on February 5 CENTURY 21 will be running their first real estate ad to ever be featured during the Super Bowl. The ad will spotlight the famous faces of real estate icon Donald Trump, speed skating champ Apolo Ohno, and Deion Sanders, a former NFL cornerback and Major League Baseball outfielder. This will be the first real estate ad to be shown during the game in the past 21 years, a detail that CENTURY 21’s chief marketing officer Bev Thorne called “coincidentally perfect.”
The company celebrated their 40th anniversary in 2011, an important milestone that they used as a jumpstart for a marketing revolution.
“We thought the Super Bowl was the perfect culmination of our year-long marketing celebration,” states Thorne, who notes that game day just happens to fall during the jump off of the spring selling season—the busiest time for real estate. This year, NBC is predicting their largest Super Bowl audience ever, with 2011 reining in 109 million viewers.
The ad acts as an extension of the company’s 2011 marketing campaign, titled “Smarter, Bolder, Faster,” a statement about the abilities of CENTURY 21 agents.
Thorne notes that the aim of the commercial is to be both entertaining, and impactful, with a message consumers will remember. Trump, Ohno and Sanders are faces viewers will recognize, allowing the ad—which will run for 30 seconds in the third quarter—to register with the audience in a short amount of time.
“Donald is instantly recognizable as a smart person in real estate,” says Thorne. “The ad shows that our CENTURY 21 agents are smarter than someone recognized as smart, bolder than bold, being Deion, and faster than the fast—Apolo.”
In addition to the 30 second slot, the company has put together more than a dozen original commercials, which Thorne refers to as “teasers,” that will run earlier in the day and will all be related to the actual commercial.
To raise hype for the ad before the big day, CENTURY 21 has been airing a video mini-series titled Operation: C21 Super Bowl, featuring CENTURY 21’s Steve Daingerfield. In the mini-series, Daingerfield is upset that his company hasn’t let him in on the top-secret Super Bowl ad, and so he goes on a variety of endeavors to try and find out for himself. In one episode, in order to point out that CENTURY 21 is the only real estate company airing a Super Bowl commercial, Daingerfield goes to other companies to ask what their ad is all about, only to be surprised to find no one else is airing one. The playful, humorous tone of the mini-series will most likely reflect the nature of the actual game-day commercial.
From mini-series to the big-day ad, it appears as if CENTURY 21’s innovative marketing and branding techniques may just place them at the forefront of the housing market as it gains steadier footing in 2012.
For more information, visit www.century21.com.
