Arrivals + Departures’ chief creative officer Jeff MacEachern says his agency typically performs a “pressure-test” on any new creative platform to see if it has legs. Its latest work for Re/Max Canada has definitely got legs: Eight of them, in fact.
A ping-pong playing octopus is among the creative executions in A+D’s latest work for the real estate brand’s quirky “Your Unfair Advantage” platform. The platform debuted last year with a pair of executions we described at the same as “oddball, verging on WTF,” including a talking moustache and a frog who turns into a prince.
The new work, again demonstrating how using a Re/Max Canada agent provides clients with an unfair advantage, is similarly peculiar.
One of two 15-second ads, “Service Points,” features a doubles ping-pong match in which a man is partnered with a headband-wearing octopus that can’t miss a shot.
The other, “Flying Distance,” shows a woman with a winged horse boasting to a new neighbour about how her Re/Max agent found them a new dream home that’s within flying distance of everything.
The campaign includes a pair of six-second ads as well as out-of-home, TSAs, programmatic video and display, paid social, search and ads for Spotify music.
As a nearly 50-year-old company, Re/Max needed to update its image to appeal to younger home buyers who now have a variety of self-serve real estate options like Zillow and Zoocasa to choose from, said Re/Max Canada’s executive vice-president of marketing Anthony Volpini.
“Our brand is well-known, but with the younger generation, they don’t know what we stand for—so it was important for us to develop a personality with this audience and articulate that by working with Re/Max they get an unfair advantage,” he said.
“[C]onsumers were starting to think of real estate companies as commodities, so we recognized it was important to stand out in what is often a sea of sameness, and make clear that Re/Max agents are different from the rest.” The “Your Unfair Advantage” campaign contributed to a 52% increase in leads and a 107% increase in blog traffic last year, while Re/Max had it best year ever in terms of new agent recruitment, with more than 1,000 new agents joining the company, said Volpini.
