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.

To demonstrate just how easy it is to sell on Opendoor we focused our efforts on live local Super Bowl spots in one hard to sell market (The first ever live spots for our local CBS affiliate). A real family selling their home real time during Halftime. This breakthrough use of the biggest media platform available catapulted Opendoor into the national Super Bowl conversation.

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 – home improvements, listing, staging, inspections – and still NO guarantee that you’ll get an offer. Opendoor was on a mission to change that. A digital platform that takes all the complexity and uncertainty out of selling. What’s not to love?

But there were a couple of problems: 1. Sellers didn’t know Opendoor existed 2. Amongst those who were aware, consideration was still low. Truth be told, sellers were skeptical.

We had 3 objectives:

Improve awareness

Increase consideration

Get people to go on Opendoor.com

In the world of real estate, the Super Bowl is considered the unofficial start of homeselling season. A great media moment to get potential homeowners attention. But instead of dropping $7M on a national spot, we decided to go local. In one of the toughest real estate markets right now - Atlanta.

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. The Super Bowl, not only was it the perfect stage, as the unofficial start to homeselling season, it was also the perfect moment.

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. Our analysis of real estate MLS data of unsold homes and average time to sell homes pointed us to Atlanta.

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.

But turns out, sellers were skeptical. It was not enough to drive awareness. We had to rewire the expectation of what selling is supposed to look like and dramatize just how easy it is to sell on Opendoor.

To get in our audience’s consideration set, we honed in on the unofficial start of selling season - the Super Bowl. Not only was it a relevant time to get on sellers’ radar, it aligned with our audience’s viewing interests. Our core target were avid sports lovers, with 23% of them being NFL superfans. iSpot tracking data confirmed strong performance in 2023 with sports.

Our strategy: Hijack this moment to show (not tell) sellers just how easy it is to sell the Opendoor way.

The campaign roll out had 3 phases:

PHASE 1

Pre Game: Seed how easy it is to get an offer with Opendoor. This phase was supported with online video, social and local OOH.

PHASE 2:

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

This was supported by 2 local Superbowl spots.

Spot #1 aired during 2nd quarter directing users to the livestream on Youtube.

Spot #2 aired during 3rd quarter celebrating a real family selling their home.

The WANF’s tech team had to be at the shoot to directly feed the results of the live spot into the broadcast. No easy feat.

PHASE 3:

Post Game: Fuel 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 partners.

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.

By broadcasting a live demo of how Opendoor works we attacked skepticism head on, proving just how seamless selling your home on Opendoor can be. Using Super Bowl’s HalfTime to livestream a real family selling their home was a perfect way to illustrate the speed of the offer. We hijacked US’s largest live event, livestreaming a real family selling their home. The stunt helped us punch way above our media weight driving buzz and national attention.