It’s pretty epic.

Seriously. I love the honesty. The attitude. And the tongue in cheek humor puts it over the top.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-RLqLx1iYI[/youtube]

Besides, any guy who can take a crescent wrench to the face 5 times will win my business ever time.

Looking for a mobile home? Check out Cullman Liquidation.

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A guest post from Tim Fagan, CEO of HomeFinder.com

Things were simpler then, more familiar. You knew who to call, what to do and what to expect.

I’m talking about the good old days of real estate advertising.

Back then, you dealt with the sales rep for the local paper over a cup of coffee. Maybe you sponsored a little league team or bought a spot on the back of the church bulletin. And your audience? You could count on them to be in just a few places, at the same times, week in and week out.

Those days are long gone, a fact that has been amply documented. I won’t belabor that point.

The more important question is this: Now that the game has changed, how can we make it simpler for real estate advertisers?

Think about it: The average agent, broker or brokerage marketing director is faced with a panoply of media, formats and creative challenges these days.

On the table are:

• SEM/pay-per-click
• Brand display ads
• Direct response display ads
• Syndication
• Video
• Mobile
• Print

And this, mind you, is a growing list. Video wasn’t there three years ago; mobile wasn’t there just one year ago. Next year you may need to consider your strategy for Tweet ads, or feel pressure to get into the “augmented reality” game.

I know, it’s a little scary. And most brokers, and darn near all agents, don’t have the in-house talent to master all these platforms. Nor do they have the budget needed to hire a digital agency that does.

What to do?

Here are a few recommendations, from both the advertiser and publisher side of the business.

For advertisers (brokers and agents)

When Google launched Adwords back in 2002, thousands of brokers and agents jumped on the opportunity. After all, who wouldn’t explore performance-based advertising?

The problem was few practitioners had the time or skill necessary to optimize an SEM campaign. Results for many were disappointing.

My point: Pick media you are confident you can execute well in. If your marketing department has a good designer, you may want to focus on display ads. If you have a great headline/call to action writer on your team, SEM may be a good choice. If you or your broker performs well in front of the camera, start syndicating video.

Stick to that which you are capable executing well.

Secondly, for digital media, make sure you think beyond the click. By this I mean where the user is taken when they click on your ad. Whether this is a property detail page or a more conventional landing page, you have to make certain you present the user with something that is clear, consistent in message and look with the ad that got them to click, and loaded with a strong call to action.

If you can’t execute beyond the click, don’t bother.

For publishers

We as publishers – those site owners or media channels that sell advertising to brokers and agents – can also do our share to simplify the advertising ecosystem.

For one, we can offer cross-platform buys. At HomeFinder, we offer national exposure through HomeFinder.com combined with local placement on individual newspaper sites. Brokers and agents like this because it allows them to kill two birds with one stone.

Adwords now has a mobile offering. Several companies are marrying listings syndication with distribution to YouTube.

We are getting there. But we need to move more quickly to offer integrated packages that streamline the process for our advertisers.

Second, publishers should do more to share best practices with their advertisers. Many sales people take a consultative approach with broker and agent clients as far as structuring an ad buy, but I’m talking about something more.

For example, a strong case can be made that any large publisher would do well to hire an in-house marketing specialist available to help clients evaluate creative, craft messaging and optimize landing pages. If that sounds over the top, consider that newspapers sometimes create ads for smaller clients.

Moving forward

We will never again see a world where advertising is straightforward and audiences are concentrated. Our time is one of multiple, often blended, media channels and atomized audiences.

Our aim should be to make that reality more manageable.

If you’d like to have your writing featured on FOREM blog, please email us at futureofrealestate@gmail.com

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I know that some companies strive very hard to be creative with their advertising. And yet most in the real estate space, despite their best intentions (and big budgets), fail miserably (see Coldwell and Banker Back At Helm). 

And while this may have been forgivable during the height of the bubble; now, when the market is at it’s most vulnerable, and folks crying out for some guidance and clarity, we’re really seeing some doozies. 

Like this ad from national homebuilder DR Horton. (h/t Hot Property)

Or this gem from RE/Max (I’m not picking on them I swear…)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSTdelX3_gU[/youtube]

Problem is, it’s not a funny time. 

These ads are pandering and an insult to our intelligence. It’s about dumbing it down to the lowest common denominator. It’s advertising 1.0 thinking… that we’re more clever than you are, so listen to what we’re trying to sell you.

I don’t know, is it just me? Am I the only one who would like to see advertisers promote an honest discussion about where we are in the market and why there’s some hope of a rebound building out there (that the first time buyers credit seems to be stimulating some activity in certain areas). Folks I talk to want to hear about this, but nobody’s out there telling them.

Instead we get stupid gimmicks like this. Seems like a wasted opportunity to me.

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In a move I suspect may be followed by many of the other big real estate brands in 2009, last week at Real Estate Connect in New York, Century 21 announced it was shifting its television advertising dollars to support its online marketing efforts.

You can see the announcement made by Tom Kunz, president and CEO of C21 in an interview done with Susie Hale of Frogpond TV. (The announcement comes at about 3:00 minutes in).

This shift should not come as much of a surprise to many readers of this blog. But what is surprising (and refreshing) is that C21 has come out so publicly in their endorsement of new media. C21 plans to spend the bulk of their advertising investment in 2009 on display advertising, search engine marketing and enhanced listing partnerships with real estate web sites, which no doubt bodes well for companies like Zillow, Trulia and Frontdoor. Their goal, ultimately, is to generate more leads to their franchisees, affiliates and brokers and agents.

Over the last couple years we’ve seen the technology providers and pundits (myself included, natch) talk about the need for real estate industry to fully embrace the Internet as the channel of choice to connect with consumers.

The web provides a platform for brokers and agents to connect more meaningfully and, more importantly, more measurably, with the buyers and sellers who are now predominantly searching for real estate information online.

This wave has been cresting for a long time and while the smarter agents and brokers have ridden the curl of this trend for many years, and have prospered because of it, this announcement sends a clear signal that the big brands are fully committing to this new world as well.

2009 may just be the year that the wave finally comes crashing down and we see the end of big real estate’s old media habits.

Photo by prgibbs.

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It used to be if you wanted to build your own ads online you were stuck writing boring text ads like Google AdWords or Zillow EZ ads.

Not any longer. AdReady is a self-service platform for marketers that’s aiming to change that. It lets you build out a targeted banner campaign in literally just a few minutes and a few clicks.

Basically it’s bringing Google Adwords-level simplicity to banner advertising. 

Using AdReady you start an ad campaign for your business using a library of ready-made creative, which includes a number of pre-existing ads in the real estate category. You can choose your base design based on the most successful CTRs (click through rates) or simply pick whichever design catches your fancy.

The site lets you customize the basic design; change background colors, modify text and upload new photos through a slick Flash interface. When you’re done customizing it applies your changes to a series of IAB standard banner ads.

Just like with Google Adwords, you’re then ready to customize your media buy by choosing the length of the campaign and pegging a dollar figure on how much you’re willing to spend.

When you’re ready to publish, AdReady places your ad on a number of sites through its relationships with third-party ad networks. While you don’t get to choose the exact sites you want to appear on, you can geo-target your ad to a particular area and/or pick certain categories of publishers on which you’d like it to appear.

AdReady just announced a deal to bring the service to the New York Times and it’s not too much of a stretch to see that more publishers will go down a similar route self-service to add new options to small advertisers (and presumably, offload some of their excess banner inventory).

The downside of course, is that your ads will be fairly generic. But nevertheless, it’s interesting to think how you could use AdReady’s platform to create a flexible advertising campaign really quickly and inexpensive. You could advertise your blog, your business and even your listings.

This is definitely a growing trend I’m seeing. Online tools like AdReady, widget builders like Sprout (see Sprout Lets You Build Single Property Widgets) and video tools like Spotmixer (see Video Advertising to Dominate Online Ads) all give you loads of room to get creative, on the cheap.

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An advertisement from OptHome, a company that offers to “unbiasedly search all licensed agents to help you choose the one that is right for you.”

Let’s face it, this is every consumer’s worst nightmare when it comes to finding an agent and this ad taps right into that fear. No idea how effective the service is, but the ad is a winner in my books.

From CondoDomain (via Sellsius)

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Microsoft is definitely serious about becoming an advertising play on the web. Their $6 Billion acquistion of aQuantive, an online advertising and marketing company, was just the first in a series of steps they plan on taking in this arena.

MS’ adCenter Labs lies at the heart of a lot of these future initiatives and is a great source of interesting information for marketers – like this Demographics Prediction tool (go to town on your favorite Real Estate 2.0 site) or their Top Search Term Demographical Composition Study (.Docx file).

One nugget; “Female Windows Live Search audiences are more likely to click on mortgage ads, as they generated 59% of the total clicks.”

Who knew?

At their recent Demo Fest, MS unveiled a number of new technologies they are working on. Several of which conceivably have application to real estate.

Air Wave. This technology creates a “fourth screen” experience beyond the TV, PC and mobile phone to enable advertisers to engage consumers outside of the home in public places such as an airport or a shopping mall. By using an interactive, multitouch screen display, consumers can play games or interact with advertisements to receive coupons or product information. With the help of a webcam, they can try on products such as sunglasses virtually. This technology builds on the “large display ads” technology showcased at last year’s Demo Fest.

Contextual Ads for Video. Through speech recognition, this technology enables ads to be dynamically served based on the content discussed in the video. For example, if the topic of the video was gardening, ads related to gardening or lawn improvement could be served in an adjacent text-based ad as the video played. For advertisers, this provides access to consumers while at the point of consideration.Intelligent Bug Ads. This technology balances the interests of advertisers and the target audience by locating nonintrusive frames in a video in which to place ads. By using a computer vision algorithm to calculate the least intrusive spot in the video, it approximates human judgment and places the ad in the video where it is least likely to interfere with the consumer’s viewing experience.

Visual Product Browsing. This tool uses computer vision algorithms to browse and categorize images as a human might, without the need for manual data tagging. Online shoppers could use this technology to visually browse categorized images of products such as lamps and narrow their search to find “more like this” options through physical and visual characteristics such as the product’s height, depth and width. This brings efficiency to photo browsing and enhanced targeting capabilities for advertisers who are trying to better understand user intent and preferences.

Couple some of these products with some of their other undertakings, namely Photosynth (see Next Generation Virtual Tours) and Surface (see Surface Technology Could Save Full Service Brokers), and we could actually (surprise!) see some real innovation coming out of Redmond in the future.

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I was recently sent an email by a reader regarding Facebook’s take on placing real estate listings in its Marketplace. I thought it presented an interesting dilemma, so I’m reprinting here.

To summarize. Facebook, it seems, does not want Realtors placing their listings in its marketplace and will suspend the accounts of any persons caught doing so. Instead, it prefers that Realtors promote them using its paid ‘Social Ads’ service.

To be fair, I can kind of understand Facebook’s desire to keep its marketplace from being populated with thousands of homes for sale. But are Realtors wrong to want to take advantage of this service?

Further, it does seem kind of heavy handed for Facebook to single out one agent versus others that are clearly doing the same thing and moreover, then forcing them to use their CPC and CPM products to promote their listings. Is this good business strategy for Facebook or a predatory move to squeeze money out of Realtors?

I’m thinking maybe Facebook needs to compromise and create a separate section for real estate listings.

In any case, what’s your take? Full email re-printed below (read thread from bottom up):

My company, is fully engaged in utilizing social media and networks to promote our inventory and reach potential clients. Of course, one of the social networking sites many of my agents have been exploring as a way to promote themselves and their listings is Facebook.

Recently, Facebook launched a mini-app called marketplace–and section therein presumably dedicated to the promotion of for sale listings. Myself and my agents thought this would be a great place to put our listings and tap into the community of Facebook members who may be in the market to purchase a home. In fact, we noticed many other Realtors doing the same.

Well, yesterday something strange happened. One of my agents decided to place her inventory under the for sale section in marketplace. She made sure she followed all the rules and even studied how other Realtors posted their listings there. Then out of nowhere she received an email notification telling her to please remove her listings from the site or else her profile could be suspended. I took a look at her postings and there was nothing out of the ordinary. Many other Realtors have posted their inventory in the exact same manner, yet she was singled out.

Rather than try and explain the subsequent dialogue between her and a representative from Facebook, I’ll post a summary of the back and forth emails here:

—–Original Message—–
From: Sales Support [mailto:sales-support+ngltjtq@facebook.com]
Sent: Tue 1/22/2008 5:24 PM
To: redacted
Subject: Re: RE: Facebook Warning

Hi redacted,

You may not list your business inventory in Marketplace. If you would like to advertise your inventory, we recommend Facebook Ads.

Facebook Social Ads leverage the power of Facebook News Feed by serving relevant stories when users’ friends take actions with brands or businesses. Social Ads can include just the advertiser’s creative or the advertiser’s creative with a social action as the headline.

There are two versions of Social Ads that can be purchased on either a CPC or CPM basis. A Sponsored Story is how a business or brand can start to promote their product or service on Facebook. This ad unit is 100% branded by the advertiser with copy and image and does not include any social interactions. It can link to a Facebook Page, Application or external website. An ad directed to a Facebook Page or Application can generate social actions for future campaigns. A Sponsored Social Story is a Sponsored Story with a user’s friends’ interactions with a Facebook Page or Application as the headline. It includes the branded image and copy from the advertiser alongside the social action. To create a Sponsored Social Story you will need to select the ‘Use social interactions in your ad’ option when creating your ad.

To learn more about Social Ads and start creating your campaign, please visit http://www.facebook.com/ads/create/index.php?.

Let us know if you have any further questions.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Ryann
Customer Operations
Facebook

—–Original Message to Facebook—–
From: redacted
To: sales-support+ngltjtq@facebook.com
Subject: RE: RE: Facebook Warning

Dear Ryann,

As a Realtor for [redacted] I placed 4 listings:
3 listings were individual units Units 1,2 & 3 in the same building (South Boston) and
1 listing was a single family home in West Roxbury.

I have reviewed other real estate listings from other agencies and I feel I had complied with all the Terms of Use. Would you please advise me on what I am doing wrong so I may correct it and resubmit the listings. Thank you.

REALTOR

—–Original Message—–
From: Sales Support [mailto:sales-support+ngltjtq@facebook.com]
Sent: Sun 1/20/2008 1:52 PM
To:  redacted
Subject: Re: RE: Facebook Warning

Hi redacted,

Facebook reserves the right to remove listings that violate the Marketplace Guidelines and/or Facebook’s Terms of Use. Facebook prohibits users from posting listings to promote a business or brand. We removes joke listings, as well as those that are miscategorized, irrelevant, or do not advertise an actual, legitimate product. Duplicate or spam listings are also removed.

If a listing is removed for any of these reasons, no refund will be issued. Unfortunately, for both technical and security reasons, Facebook cannot provide further information about the removed content. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Please refrain from posting content that violates our Terms in the future. If you would like more information on content prohibited in Marketplace, please feel free to read Facebook’s Marketplace Guidelines.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Ryann
Customer Operations
Facebook

—–Original Message to Facebook—–
From: redacted
To: warning+hjk5~v5m@facebookmail.com, warning@facebook.com
Subject: RE: Facebook Warning

Hello,

I have reviewed the Terms of Use multiple times and I do not understand how I violated the terms of use. I would appreciate a response. Thank you.

REALTOR

—–Original Message—–
From: Facebook [mailto:warning+hjk5~v5m@facebookmail.com]
Sent: Fri 1/18/2008 5:21 PM
To: redacted
Subject: Facebook Warning

Hello,

You posted a Marketplace listing that violated our Terms of Use, and this listing has been removed. We do not allow spam, nudity, drug use, attacks on an individual or group, or other obscene content. Continued misuse of Facebook’s features could result in your account being disabled.

If you have any questions or concerns, you can contact us at warning@facebook.com from your login email address.

The Facebook Team

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OK so this is only marginally real estate related… but I got my Beta invite from Hulu.com over the weekend and I have to say I am pretty impressed.

For those of you who didn’t know, Hulu is a joint effort by NBC/Universal and Fox to bring TV to the web. Major media have been much ridiculed for their “heads-in-the-sand” approach to Web 2.0; but I gotta say, this is legit.

It’s high quality video, extremely usable and feature rich. I could actually even see myself giving up my monthly cable bill for Hulu’s on-demand approach someday.

I’ve embedded a test clip below to you give you a sense of how it looks.

Pretty cool. And I’m going to do my best to put a real estate marketing spin on this.

Hulu is a heads up to the very near future where cable’s stranglehold on the delivery on video programming fractures for good (thank God). On demand video delivered over the Internet will eventually completely supplement the traditional scheduled television experience, all except for live events like news and sports anyway.

An on demand world does have implications for a real estate marketing budgets, or at the very least for the big brands anyway. But far from it being the extinction of TV advertising – it’s just the traditional 30 second spot that’s about to become the dinosaur.

Sponsored content, pop-up interstitials and branded content (when the sponsor itself is embedded in the program) are the most likely directions the industry is heading. And the best thing is that real estate offers so many obvious opportunities for content and much of it is “evergreen” in nature; take a local program like Chicagoland’s HomesPlus, for example.

As a real estate brand, aligning yourself with a producer (or even producing it yourself) and distributing a show over the ‘Net is about to become even easier to do. Sites like Hulu are building the infrastructure. Consumers are shifting their consumption patterns. Just give it a little more time.

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…or One Week with Facebook Social Ads

The recent Facebook Beacon controversy aside (see Mark Zuckerberg’s Mea Culpa) – Facebook’s Social Ads are one of the most fascinating advertising platforms that has been introduced to the Web over the last little while.

When the platform launched, I posited that it could be a very precise way to target real estate advertising (see Marketing Yourself with Facebook Flyers) to specific members of the network, especially if you grouped members through their physical location (neighborhood) or their employer.

Rather than just talking the talk however, I set out over the last week to really walk the walk. I created a handful of specifically targeted ads to promote my FOREM fan page (see Advertising Your Real Estate Business on Facebook) using creative I developed specifically for this campaign – the “I’m a FOREM fan” badge that you can see on the top of the right column of this blog.

The results so far… not too bad.

Baseline for my campaign.

• I set myself a $50 a day budget. Might sound expensive, but remember, Social Ads are Cost-Per-Click so you only pay for the clicks and I never even hit that daily limit.
• I set a $1 per click bid (the minimum is $0.10) so that I would sit higher in the rotation and get more impressions. Again, you only pay for when people click through, so set a bid that you are comfortable paying for but remember if it’s too low you’ll get very few impressions.

Here are my results:

When I created the ads I deliberately targeted people who had identified themselves as working for some of the larger real estate brokerages (I also threw in folks who worked at Zillow, Redfin and Move.com) and targeted the message specifically for each. I made sure that the title of the ad identified the specific company they worked for – the idea being that that would pique their curiosity.

If you review the chart, you’ll see I had the best response from Realtors who work at Keller Williams. Here’s what my ad for KW looked like.

Since I had a pretty high CPC bid, I got a decent amount of daily impressions. My best day was Wednesday, where I got nearly 1500 impressions of the ad across my campaign.

As an advertiser, I benefit somewhat from some residual brand recognition that these impressions generate but since I was trying to promote my Facebook Page, I was really hoping for people to click through the ad and visit the page.

My best day resulted in 7 clicks – not a stellar result, but again I’m only paying for these clicks, so it did help keep the overall cost down.

So, results.

I did see a steady increase over the week in the number of people who identified themselves as “fans” of my FOREM page.

As an aside, Facebook also gives you a nice demographic breakdown of your fans too.

My theory going into this experiment is that people who were curious enough about the ad to click through to see the Facebook page would then probably be compelled to click through and visit the blog itself.

Sure enough, Facebook helped send a trickle of traffic through to FOREM.

Bottom line, if you have a product or service you are trying to reach Realtors with – following a strategy similar to mine might be a good way to put yourself in front of your target market.

Now, if you’re a Realtor, and are trying to reach consumers, you might try experimenting with targeting a message to large employers in your area. Or reaching people in your city who have identified one of their interests as “real estate”.

Remember – the beautiful thing about this platform is that you can be very precise with who you’re targeting, so make sure you take the time to personalize the message to them.

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