Responses by Evan Carpenter, group strategy director, Mother New York; and Andrea Mazandi, principal brand strategist, StreetEasy.

Background: “StreetEasy is the only real estate platform built specifically for New York City,” explains Andrea Mazandi. “Over the past two decades, we’ve built a strong brand reputation with the city’s renters, who make up about 70 percent of the population. But with this campaign, we aimed to build awareness among buyers in the city and showcase that StreetEasy also offers data and resources to support their journey as well. We know that one in three buyers considering homes in the city are simultaneously looking at options outside the city, so we wanted to reach potential homebuyers in that pivotal decision moment and show them that being a New Yorker and being a homeowner can be compatible. So many people think about what they’ll gain by leaving the city, but we wanted to make sure they know what they would be losing as well.”

Design thinking: “For this campaign, we grounded ourselves in the core truth that once New York City moves into your heart, it never leaves,” says Evan Carpenter. “Despite all the ups and downs, the stressors and the thrills that are part of daily life and real estate in the city, the idea of living anywhere else feels almost unfathomable to New Yorkers. That’s because the city is more than just a zip code you live in; it’s a badge of honor.

“We wanted our creative strategy and the idea that it inspires to tap into that very specific sense of pride that New Yorkers have for the city—the wholehearted belief that this is the only city for them,” Carpenter continues. “That gave us a very clear adversary: leaving the city. It also gave us an interesting, unexpected hero: the people who left. They are the only voices who can speak to the truths and horrors of living outside of New York.

“Our creative platform, ‘Never Become a Former New Yorker,’ celebrates those unexpected heroes,” he continues. “Characterized depictions of former New Yorkers who feel like fish out of water juxtaposed against the idyllic, albeit sleepy suburban landscapes they now call home.

“We even extended the idea to create a two-way dialogue between former New Yorkers and current ones who may be considering a move outside the city by creating 1-833-I-MISS-NYC, a hotline for former New Yorkers to call and share their advice and stories about what they miss the most about New York,” Carpenter adds. “The voicemails and anecdotes they shared helped inspire and generate more messages for the campaign, with thousands of calls flooding into the number in just the first few weeks.”

Challenges: “In the past, most of our campaigns in the past have been illustrative, and photography in itself is a challenging medium,” Mazandi says. “We had a one-day shoot, so the stakes were high to capture what we needed because there was no going back. The other challenge was ensuring that the New Yorkiness of it all came through—that these characters read as New Yorkers and not just ‘cool people.’ The casting and wardrobe were incredibly important in making sure that we achieved that, so we were super specific in building out complete character profiles.”

“The idea behind this campaign is somewhat of a departure from the way the brand has shown up in past campaigns,” Carpenter says. “StreetEasy has built a reputation in past campaigns for nailing the nuance of what New Yorkers both celebrate and gripe about living in New York City. While this campaign lives in harmony with that established reputation, it takes a slightly different angle. It’s not directly shining a light on the day-to-day truths of living in New York City; it’s shining a light somewhere else. For that reason, we had to make sure how we showed up felt undeniably StreetEasy and undeniably New York City, especially with our visuals being of somewhere else. That meant we needed to land the tone, energy and attitude.

Favorite details: “There are so many little details in this campaign, and that specificity is really what makes such a simple concept resonate,” Mazandi says. “It wasn’t enough to just have a person standing on a lawn; it had to be a New Yorker standing on a lawn. We brought that specificity into casting and wardrobe, and we even hired a costumer rather than a typical stylist. We built out full character profiles for each New Yorker in the campaign, asking ourselves where this person would go in the city, where they would eat, what they would do for work and why they left. Then, we were able to bring in some of those details in subtle little nods, like a tote bag for the Brooklyn-based bookstore Books Are Magic or a T-shirt from Brooklyn’s gourmet fish market Fish Tales. Those little details really make the difference between a good campaign and a great one.”

Visual influences: “This campaign is a departure from our campaigns of the past in a lot of ways, but the most glaring departure is that this campaign is visually set outside of New York City,” Mazandi explains. “The city is our bread and butter both in terms of product and brand voice, so the challenge was to achieve that fish-out-of-water element and draw the distinction between the New Yorkers and their new surroundings. We thought a lot about how we were visually communicating the suburbs, and we continually asked ourselves: ‘How is this the opposite of New York City?’ The city is vibrant; the suburbs are monotonous. The city has a variety of homes; the ones in the campaign are generic. Visually, it became about identifying and communicating the reverse of everything New York City offers.”

“The resulting imagery pulls from a lot of visual references,” Carpenter says. “Personally, I have always gotten a little bit of Edward Scissorhands from the idyllic nature of the suburban landscapes we feature. There are so many amazing examples of these cookie-cutter, neat-and-tidy neighborhoods we can pull from, but the visual juxtaposition of these backdrops and the very obvious New Yorkers we dropped into these settings almost feel pulled from the Get Ready With Me social content and street photographers that chronicle everyday life in the city.”

Specific project demands: “We knew this campaign was going to be executed across a wider variety of media channels and placements than previous campaigns for the brand, so one of our greatest challenges was making sure that the execution maintained the magic and craft we loved so much in the static, transit and OOH placements core to the campaign,” Carpenter says. “StreetEasy is so known and loved in New York for their subway ads, and we wanted to build from that foundation and bring that same sense of excitement and resonance to our video, audio and streaming, and social media creative. We didn’t just replicate the core idea across each of these other channels but found interesting ways to activate the idea in ways that were right for these channels. For example, in paid social, we took real voicemails from the 1-833-I-MISS-NYC hotline we created and used kinetic type to bring visual interest to these messages in ways that would keep our audience engaged.”

motherny.com