September 17, 2009

Inside Third & Bond: Week 101

This week the folks behind the Third & Bond development blog reveal their marketing strategy for the project.
Last week Petebklyn noticed that thirdandbond.com is fully on-line. With our model units opening in October, we’ve been rolling out our marketing campaign this month. Knowing well that real estate developers’ marketing campaigns are frequent fodder for sarcastic jokes, we will dare to talk a little about what’s going on behind the scenes on ours.

So we have a logo, a tagline, a color scheme, a website. Now what? Now we have to get it out into the world. The world beyond Brownstoner. First we take advantage of the project site itself. Pasqualina Azzarello, who also painted our construction fence mural and coordinated the mural project with the Brooklyn New School, was commissioned to do our branded signage on the sidewalk shed. We like the hand-painted look, and employing a local artist. Originally, we wanted the design to grow out from the center, where our tagline, “What Really Matters” marches across a bright yellow sun. Each week, Pasqualina would come back and paint more of the vine and the items that emerge from the vine. But the reality of moving scaffolding around between material deliveries and trucks made it hard to accomplish. And given that Third Street isn’t exactly a main thoroughfare, we didn’t know if people would notice the creeping changes the way they might in Union Square or Times Square. A good idea with no associated cost except for headache – put that one into our back-pocket for a more appropriate spot. The signage is intended to blend our marketing specifications and Pasqualina’s artistic style.

Next...

...we make a plan for media outlays. We want to spend the most money in months when we expect to generate interest in the project. We’ll spend less money in November and December this year than in September and October.

We will do a lot of on-line media, including a banner ad on this website and next month on Curbed. On-line media placement is a sophisticated beast. You pay for placement: a leaderboard ad runs across the top of the page while a skyscraper runs vertically on the side. You pay per number of impressions, which means how many times your ad loads onto the page. It is not uncommon to pay for 100,000+ impressions in a month. Sometimes you pay per click, which means you pay an additional amount each time someone clicks on the advertisement to go to your website. The crazier stuff, like pop-up ads that run until you find the tiny letters, “skip ad” are not part of our campaign.

We will also be found in New York Times even though we expect fewer and fewer people use the Sunday print classifieds to search for a new home. It’s reasonably priced and still an important reference point.

Beyond that, we’ll look at ads in Brooklyn papers and commuter papers, as well as publications catering to brokers. We haven’t jumped on the Facebook or Twitter bandwagon yet.

What do you think – is that an effective means to getting the word out?

Inside Third & Bond: Weeks 1-100 [Brownstoner]
The complete offering terms are in an Offering Plan available from Sponsor. File No. CD080490. Sponsor: Hudson Third LLC, 826 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

Posted by Brownstoner at 11:31 AM | Comments (17)
Categories: Gowanus, Third & Bond Blog

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