realestate.com.au Brings the Human Factor to Housing

We’re going Down Under for our Ad Of The Week, to look at the latest Australian campaign for realestate.com.au, a good example of how to balance product features and human, emotional elements in a commercial.

Ads for real estate companies present specific challenges and opportunities. Buying or renting a house is a huge decision that represents dreams and new horizons, so it’s one where there’s so many chances to show real human emotion. But it’s also a difficult, stressful one that’s simply not relevant to some viewers (who are too young to be in the property market or too settled to worry about it) and painful to others.

And that’s not the only challenge realestate.com.au faces here. Ads for apps have a separate problem – people looking at their phones is not visually exciting, and screenshots of an app don’t capture its features and user experience well. So how does this property app deal with that?

realestate.com.au make the wise choice to focus on the people using the product, not the product itself – it’s the same technique that Nintendo use for video games, for instance. And rather than tell just one customer story, the ad cuts between lots of different families and groups, at different life stages and with different needs. That widens the scope of the ad and stops people who can’t relate to it feeling alienated.

It also means we get to see a lot of different types of positive emotion, from the excitement of young people imagining their perfect home to the quiet contentment of an older couple contemplating a move to the city.

Meanwhile we see enough of the realestate.com.au app to understand some of its innovative features, like highly immersive and AI-powered app features designed to enhance the property journey. And we see people getting excited about those innovations, which is infectious for viewers.

We tested the ad among a general audience as usual but our main focus in Test Your Ad Pro was on the 25-54 age group, the people most likely to be in the property market, as we knew outside that range emotional response was likely to reflect the housing situation as a whole not the actual ad. What we found is that the ad really struck a chord among that group, hitting a very strong 4.6-Star Rating and an exceptional short-term Spike Rating.

What is it that makes the realestate.com.au ad work so well? It’s the human element. In his books Look Out and Lemon, Orlando Wood stresses the importance of between-ness as a creative element in ads. When we see two people interacting – be it through dialogue, gestures or simply meaningful looks – the right hemisphere of our brain becomes more engaged, as it pays attention to relationships between things and people. In this ad, we see a lot of between-ness, and it triggers a stronger emotional response. As one of our participants said when asked why the ad made them feel happy – “how excited they all were”. It’s that shared excitement that lets the ad strip away the anxiety and get over the joy of looking for a home.