As the unofficial start of the selling season, the Super Bowl was a perfect time for Opendoor to drive awareness. But how do you take advantage of the big game without spending $7Million? By going local.

Not all real estate markets are created equal. Choosing a local market that was especially hard to sell in would serve as the perfect torture test for Opendoor. We settled on Atlanta. Not only did this help us demonstrate that Opendoor can help you sell anywhere, it gave us a spot under the Super Bowl spotlight without spending Super Bowl dollars.

Selling a home in the US is a time consuming and expensive endeavor. Cost of staging, showings, repairs - all really add up. Not to mention the mental burden of not knowing if and when you’ll sell.

In 2024, the real estate market in the US was going through an especially rough time. Mortgage rates had spiked. Houses were sitting unsold longer than anticipated, making a stressful process even more painful.

We saw this as an opportunity for Opendoor - A platform that addresses every pain point of the traditional selling process and gives sellers unprecedented control. But sellers are a niche target and had proven hard to reach and even harder to convince. We needed to show up in a big way to drive awareness and gain trust.

After a sleepy holiday season, the real estate market starts to wake up in February/ March. In fact, Super Bowl is generally considered the unofficial start of selling season, making it the perfect time and the right stage for us to launch the campaign.

It’s no secret that selling a home is really hard – costly home improvements, listing, staging, open houses, inspections – and still NO guarantee that you’ll get an offer.

Opendoor was on a mission to change all that. A digital platform that takes all the complexity and uncertainty out of selling, making it seamless and entirely online. What’s not to love?

But there were a couple of problems: 1. Sellers were defaulting to the only way they knew to sell - through an agent.Not enough homeowners even knew that Opendoor existed. 2. Even among those who were aware of Opendoor, consideration was still quite low. Truth be told, selling the Open Door way seemed almost too easy, like there had to be a catch. We needed to disrupt the skepticism.

We had 3 clear objectives:

Improve awareness

Increase consideration

Get people to go on Opendoor.com to get an offer

We had to convince homeowners that selling a home on Opendoor was actually exactly as easy as it looked. There was no catch. AND we needed to do it in a way that would get unprecedented attention.

So we decided to do a live product demo on the world’s biggest stage.

Our idea was audacious: Broadcast a real homeowner, selling a real home, in real time during Super Bowl Halftime.

And to really put our money where our mouth is, we picked one of the toughest cities in the US to sell a home right now - Atlanta.

The Super Bowl was the perfect time and stage for this stunt. In the world of real estate, it is considered the unofficial start of homeselling season. It was also a great media moment to get potential homeowners attention.

Opendoor was disrupting a category that had remained unchanged for a 100 years, helping homeowners circumvent all the BS that comes with selling a home. No agents. No showings. No staging. No waiting.

But turns out, sellers were skeptical.

Our research showed that sellers were conditioned to expect the process to be painful.

They even saw the pain as a signal that they’re doing it right. Something this important can’t be this easy, right?

It was not enough to drive awareness. We had to rewire the expectation that “selling a home is supposed to suck” and dramatize just how easy it is to sell on Opendoor. There is no catch.

To get in the seller's consideration, we honed in on the unofficial start of selling season - the Super Bowl. Our strategy: hijack this moment to show (not tell) sellers just how easy it is to sell the Opendoor way.

We did not have the money to do a national TV buy, so we focused our attention on a local Super Bowl buy in Atlanta - one of the toughest cities to sell a home right now.

The campaign roll out had 3 phases:

Pre Game: Seed how easy it is to get an offer with Opendoor.

The goal during this phase was to pique curiosity about the halftime showing ahead of game day. This phase was supported with online video, social and local OOH.

In Game: Live stream a real family doing a showing during Super Bowl Halftime.

In addition to the live stream on YouTube, teams were monitoring opportunities for real time response for social and earned.

Post Game:Continue the conversation and encourage others to get started at Opendoor.com

On social we posted clips of the live footage, and amplified the results with the help of PR

Awareness hit an all time high

The campaign drove a 8% lift in brand awareness nationally beating all benchmarks from previous campaigns with similar spend.

From an earned perspective the campaign gained half a billion earned impressions.

Adding up to $6.9M worth of free exposure - media exposure equivalent to the $7Million we did NOT spend on a national Superfowl spot

Consideration increased dramatically.

We saw a big jump in post campaign consideration in Atlanta from 67% to 84%.

Response rate to the campaign was positive - there was 10X increase in search-interest and 2X increase in engagement rates.

Business Impact

88% increase in site visits in Atlanta - Every new visit to the site also became a new lead for the brand

We also saw a whopping 31% increase in offers in Atlanta.