Housing.com launches first TV spot

A year after executing the high decibel outdoor campaign Look Up, the real-estate portal Housing.com has launched its first television spot. Executed by Propaganda India, the ad debuts during this year’s IPL tournament with the aim to create an emotional connect with the consumer.

The campaign is targetted at first-time home buyers, as well as first-time investors, who fall in the age group of 25-40 years. The media outreach will include channels across GECs, sports, news, movies and regional. The campaign will also be amplified across online, social, and mobile platforms.

Carrying the tagline ‘Yeh Ghar Meri Jaan Hai’, the campaign features stories of people across age groups and what ‘home’ means to them -- be it a young couple moving into a new home, or the great Indian joint family living together – the ad portrays the joy each one feels to own one's home.

While online real-estate players such as 99acres, MagicBricks, and Commonfloor have advertised prolifically on television, this is Housing.com’s first ad on the medium. On being quizzed why Housing.com chose to launch a television campaign now, Nikhil Rungta, CMO, Housing.com, says it is the right time to build an emotional connect with consumers.

“We are the youngest brand in the online real-estate space. Having spent the last few years in building a great product and a strong supply chain, we felt this is the right time to connect with consumers. Last year, we did launch a campaign (Look Up) to tell the world that we are there and now with this campaign, we want to establish a deeper emotional bond with the consumer. I feel home buying is an extremely emotional decision and probably one of the most critical. Television allows you to build that connect because a story can be told there,” explains Rungta.

The company has also refreshed its logo to further strengthen its presence as a leading technology company in the real-estate sector.

“The addition of ‘.com’ will help differentiate Housing.com from the generic word ‘Housing’ and enable consumers to know that we are the ideal platform for them to find their perfect home online. The new logo is symbolic of our business principles of transparency, value, and simplicity of use,” adds Rungta.

He lists some of the trends that Housing.com has been tracking in consumer behaviour. According to him, people are spending more time on the internet looking for customised information. Hence, brands need to create customised communication. The attention span of consumers is getting narrower, and therefore, for marketers the challenge is to showcase the product or message briefly, yet make it cool.

Talking about the campaign, Priya Jayaraman, co-founder and business director, Propaganda India, says, “Home ownership is a feeling of pride, something that shapes our lives. Homes play a central role for each of us as we grow up, and there's a lot of heart and soul put in one’s search for a home. The ad’s tagline ‘Yeh Ghar Meri Jaan Hai’ captures that emotion and how a brand like Housing.com actually has made this journey as much theirs.”

The ad has been directed by Vasan Bala who has written the script for the Hindi film Lunchbox, and has assisted Anurag Kashyap in films such as Gulaal, and Dev D.

Founded in 2012, Housing.com claims to have 1.7 million verified homes listed to date on its platform. It provides independently verified listings of every home listed, conducted by a trained team of data collectors, analysts, auditors and photographers.

It has led a number of strategic acquisitions, such as Indian Real-Estate Forum (the largest community forum on buying and selling homes), Realty Business Intelligence (an established company focussed on doing due diligence of new real-estate projects), and HomeBuy360, a popular software for developers to manage and enhance their marketing and sales efforts.

The company raised over $100 million in capital from investors such as Softbank, Nexus Ventures, Falcon Edge, Helion Ventures, Nirvana Ventures, Qualcomm, DST founder Yuri Milner, Viacom 18 co-founder Haresh Chawla, and Snapdeal founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal.