• by Tanya Gazdik , June 1, 2016

Realtor.com is bringing back actress Elizabeth Banks for another round of TV spots and digital videos. The online real estate destination operated by News Corp subsidiary Move, Inc. is focusing on the dream home search. The campaign also includes social integrations.

With the tagline of "Dream home. Find home. Own home," the campaign brings to life the home search process on realtor.com.  The ads are a humorous blend of home ownership fantasies and buying tips that feature Banks crashing people's dreams as they imagine the perfect spot in their perfect home. 

Created by Pereira & O'Dell New York, alongside Andrew Strickman, Move's head of brand and chief creative, the "Own Home" campaign features five TV spots. Realtor.com debuted its first marketing campaign with Elizabeth Banks in May 2015.

“We spent a lot of time last year looking for the perfect spokesperson for realtor.com, and we kept coming back to Elizabeth,” Strickman tells Marketing Daily. “She is smart, thoughtful, hilarious and incredibly relatable to a wide demographic: Millennials, Gen Xers, Baby Boomers all connect with her. And the fact that she’s a self-proclaimed real estate junkie didn’t hurt.”

The spots end with a riff from the Eurythmics song "Sweet Dreams. (Are Made of This).”

“During the edit process we knew we needed to find the perfect coda to the comedy,” Strickman says. “‘Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)’ was one of the first songs we slotted in, and after six weeks of looking for alternatives, we couldn’t find anything that matched its perfect power. We approached Annie Lennox through her publishers and she immediately approved the usage, which from what we hear doesn’t happen too often. It has become the theme song of this campaign and will continue as the campaign does.”

The TV ads debut on June 1 and will run across major broadcast networks and cable channels, including CBS, HGTV, Bravo, TBS, TLC and Spike. The campaign will also appear on NBC in June during the P&G Men's and Women's Gymnastics Championships on the Road to Rio lead up to the 2016 Olympics. The social executions will begin to roll out later this month, with the digital tips featuring Banks going live this summer.

The brand also plans an eight-episode digital series of home-buying tips with Banks where she "interviews" real estate-savvy characters from her own dreams -- including a not-so-friendly T-Rex, her middle school crush and a magical pony. The company will also broaden the campaign's digital reach with a series of platform-specific video vignettes across Instagram and Facebook.

“Awareness for realtor.com has grown massively over the last three years of our consumer advertising, but our primary goal this year is to demonstrate why realtor.com is consumers’ best option for finding the home they’ve been dreaming about,” Strickman says. “We have more homes for sale, updated more frequently than any other site or app. This message and this differentiation appeal to everyone from a Millennial first-time buyer to a baby boomer looking for their perfect vacation property. Our campaign aims to reach all of them.”

Humor has been the core differentiator through which the brand’s message comes through, he says.

“Advertising in the real estate category has been marked over the years by a sea of saccharine sameness — it’s formulaic storytelling,” Strickman says. “We’ve always known that in order to break through, we had to break that mold, we had to stand out — we had to be different.”