Morgan Freeman Stars in Homes.com Super Bowl Spot
Homes.com – a CoStar Group leading online residential marketplace – returns to the big game with two 30-second spots: “Not Saying We’re the Best” during the first quarter and “Still Not Saying We’re the Best” during the third quarter. These spots, directed by Taika Waititi and brand spokesperson and actor Dan Levy, alongside co-star Heidi Gardner and a special cameo by the legendary Morgan Freeman, irreverently proclaim the company’s belief: Homes.com is the best.
The new commercials feature Levy, as head of Homes.com, and Gardner, his top executive, doing their best to convince their corporate lawyer to let them say what is plainly true: Homes.com is the best home-shopping site. As any good corporate lawyer would, he continues to object to making such a bold claim in an advertisement, while they offer increasingly creative ways to restate their claim. The story continues and escalates across the two 30-second spots during the game. Ultimately Morgan Freeman delivers a powerful testament in a way only Morgan Freeman can.
Last year, during Super Bowl LVIII, CoStar Group launched the largest real estate marketing campaign in history with a $1 billion initiative to introduce Homes.com. Within just one year, our campaign has driven 110 million average monthly unique visitors to the Homes.com Network for the last fiscal quarter according to Google Analytics - an audience comparable to the Super Bowl's viewership, and nearly double that of Realtor.com’s 62 million average monthly unique visitors for the last fiscal quarter, according to its publicly reported internal data. Homes.com’s consumer brand awareness skyrocketed, jumping from 4% to 33%.
Homes.com is the first major U.S. real estate portal to focus first on helping homeowners and their agents leverage the marketing power of the internet to bring more potential buyers to their listings. Other major real estate websites divert the leads from home sellers’ MLS listings to sell them to unrelated agents who may use them to sell competing properties. On average, Homes.com’s Members are winning 58% more listings because they offer the home sellers a real estate portal that works for them not against them.
Andy Florance, founder and chief executive officer of CoStar Group, said, “We believe that it is obvious that Homes.com is the best home shopping website anywhere, but our lawyers told us while it may be true, we cannot legally say that in an ad. So we turned to the very best talent in RPA, Taika Waititi, Dan Levy, Heidi Gardner, and Morgan Freeman to not tell the world that Homes.com is the best. When Morgan Freeman says so who can say it is not so?
Andy added, “We believe that Homes.com offers home shoppers the most content on an attractive spam free site. 100% of home shoppers use the internet to look for their next home purchase and we believe that Homes.com is the best place to successfully market a home for sale. We suspect that home sellers would be outraged if they knew that other real estate portals use their listings as bait to generate leads for potentially competing agents and competing homes for sale. That is why we put the home sellers first with our “Your Listing Your Lead” principal.
In the weeks and months following the Super Bowl, Homes.com will sustain awareness and engagement in a significant way across TV, streaming video, digital, social, and audio in almost all major outlets. Viewers across the U.S. are learning about Homes.com, and quickly adopting the platform as the best home search, buying and selling solution.
