StreetEasy Verbal Identity
StreetEasy, the Zillow brand built for NYC, is where New Yorkers go to buy, sell, and rent in the city. They know StreetEasy has the marketplace, tools, and data to help them land a home in a notoriously complex real estate market.
As a real estate platform, StreetEasy recognizes the critical importance of a versatile verbal identity that not only caters to buyers, renters, and sellers, but also resonates with our agent partners. Our commitment to embodying the core principles of our brand pillars—essential, empowering, transparent, trusted, energizing, and effective—reflects in all our marketing endeavors. But on top of that, we also need to create campaigns that break through with a discerning audience who are experts at tuning out conventional advertising: New Yorkers.
A New York City Brand
To captivate the attention of New Yorkers, StreetEasy has consistently rolled out campaigns that delve into thought-provoking and creatively crafted concepts. Our campaigns often center around a clever insight into how New Yorkers navigate neighborhoods, a visually striking representation of the inevitable trade-offs of city living, or a metaphor that captures the love felt for a perfect search filter amenity.
For years, our campaigns have predominantly focused on out-of-home media placements, particularly subway ads. The subway environment serves as an effective platform for engaging New Yorkers: they are a captive audience with time on their hands and sporadic WiFi connectivity.
While many national brands adapt their campaigns for New York City, the common outcome tends to be a series of clichéd references to dollar slices, crowded subways, and the city's relentless pace. In our approach to avoid falling into the pitfall of "localization cringe," we strive to resonate with New Yorkers through original insights, intelligent humor, and hyper-specificity. StreetEasy stands out as a beloved brand due to our unparalleled comprehension of New York City, and we aim to infuse this authenticity into every aspect of our campaigns.
While most StreetEasy campaigns have focused on the search for rental apartments, last year we expanded the campaign’s focus to also include buyers and sellers. Though this new audience makes up a comparative minority of the city’s population, we wanted to make sure that the renters who know and trust StreetEasy so much know that we’re here to support them when they’re ready to take the next step to plant permanent roots in the city as homeowners as well.
Last year’s "The Dream is Different Here" was the first StreetEasy campaign designed to be omnichannel — appearing on subways, murals, digital channels, and more. The success of this full-funnel approach led to a clearer understanding of what we wanted the 2024 campaign to do: speak to potential buyers.
Let the Journey Begin
This year’s campaign, called “Let the Journey Begin,” was led by StreetEasy’s in-house brand marketing and creative teams, in partnership with creative agency Mother New York and artistic partner Buck.
The brief we gave to Mother was challenging. The buyer’s journey in New York City is so complex: there are so many steps to the process, so many hurdles, and when someone is making the biggest investment of their life, the emotions can range from tragedy to victory. But Mother presented a strategic idea that leaned into this reality: The Hero’s Journey. Through using a popular storytelling framework, they helped us to understand how the ups and downs of NYC buying would allow us to hit all the main points of the buyer’s journey, embrace the emotion and drama of buying, and maintain our track record of a hyper-specific and realistic approach to showing life in New York City.
"Let the Journey Begin" captures all the conflicting feelings experienced throughout the epic odyssey of purchasing a home in New York City, in the dramatic style of Renaissance painting. Using an illustrative visual style felt like a nice continuation from our past work, and the Renaissance art was a perfect match for showing a buyer move from their call to adventure to their return home.
During the process of creating the look and feel for the campaign, Mother’s creative team experimented with different copy concepts. When they presented the idea for the artwork cards (also called object labels) we knew that was the right direction.
Although we explored directions that leaned more into painting tropes — for example, including a painted frame around the artwork — we decided the copy concept did all the heavy lifting needed to communicate the Renaissance painting concept, but in a more subtle and clever way. It also had flexibility to lean more epic in some instances, and more funny in others.
A lot of care went into deciding which neighborhoods were used in the campaign copy, and how well those paired with the art. Every team working on this campaign — StreetEasy, Mother, Buck — all obsessed over the neighborhood details. Are we seeing the accurate view of New Jersey based on where the ferry travels? Are we showing the most likely style of flooring and closet for a Greenpoint post-war? Is the architecture of the window right for Forest Hills?
This level of detail also went into an array of Easter eggs throughout the entire campaign. In the East Village scene alone, the team at Mother went on location to capture a specific intersection that could be recreated accurately. If you look closely, you’ll see the ubiquitous orange Mud coffee cup, Barcade, Whatever Tattoo, local personality Leh-Boy, and a flier for Dan Smith Will Teach You Guitar. These Easter eggs are fun for New Yorkers to see, but they also show that we truly know this city.
StreetEasy’s verbal identity is strategically flexible. We have many different types of audiences to talk to, and they each require a different nuanced verbal approach. As a brand that often uses highly conceptual creative concepts, we sometimes decide it’s more important to get the tone of the concept right and not shoehorn in an overly-restrictive brand voice just because it’s sitting in a PDF somewhere. For this year’s campaign, we embraced the fun of the Renaissance painting concept, while holding onto our usual wit and NYC expertise.
We tailor our voice to our different B2C and B2B audiences – but no matter the tone, we always want to communicate how StreetEasy is the trusted brand in NYC to help people make the city home. Whether explicit or implicit, we always want to show that StreetEasy truly understands New Yorkers and New York City real estate.
Jason Ferguson is Creative Director at StreetEasy.
StreetEasy Verbal Identity
StreetEasy, the Zillow brand built for NYC, is where New Yorkers go to buy, sell, and rent in the city. They know StreetEasy has the marketplace, tools, and data to help them land a home in a notoriously complex real estate market.
As a real estate platform, StreetEasy recognizes the critical importance of a versatile verbal identity that not only caters to buyers, renters, and sellers, but also resonates with our agent partners. Our commitment to embodying the core principles of our brand pillars—essential, empowering, transparent, trusted, energizing, and effective—reflects in all our marketing endeavors. But on top of that, we also need to create campaigns that break through with a discerning audience who are experts at tuning out conventional advertising: New Yorkers.
A New York City Brand
To captivate the attention of New Yorkers, StreetEasy has consistently rolled out campaigns that delve into thought-provoking and creatively crafted concepts. Our campaigns often center around a clever insight into how New Yorkers navigate neighborhoods, a visually striking representation of the inevitable trade-offs of city living, or a metaphor that captures the love felt for a perfect search filter amenity.
For years, our campaigns have predominantly focused on out-of-home media placements, particularly subway ads. The subway environment serves as an effective platform for engaging New Yorkers: they are a captive audience with time on their hands and sporadic WiFi connectivity.
While many national brands adapt their campaigns for New York City, the common outcome tends to be a series of clichéd references to dollar slices, crowded subways, and the city's relentless pace. In our approach to avoid falling into the pitfall of "localization cringe," we strive to resonate with New Yorkers through original insights, intelligent humor, and hyper-specificity. StreetEasy stands out as a beloved brand due to our unparalleled comprehension of New York City, and we aim to infuse this authenticity into every aspect of our campaigns.
While most StreetEasy campaigns have focused on the search for rental apartments, last year we expanded the campaign’s focus to also include buyers and sellers. Though this new audience makes up a comparative minority of the city’s population, we wanted to make sure that the renters who know and trust StreetEasy so much know that we’re here to support them when they’re ready to take the next step to plant permanent roots in the city as homeowners as well.
Last year’s "The Dream is Different Here" was the first StreetEasy campaign designed to be omnichannel — appearing on subways, murals, digital channels, and more. The success of this full-funnel approach led to a clearer understanding of what we wanted the 2024 campaign to do: speak to potential buyers.
Let the Journey Begin
This year’s campaign, called “Let the Journey Begin,” was led by StreetEasy’s in-house brand marketing and creative teams, in partnership with creative agency Mother New York and artistic partner Buck.
The brief we gave to Mother was challenging. The buyer’s journey in New York City is so complex: there are so many steps to the process, so many hurdles, and when someone is making the biggest investment of their life, the emotions can range from tragedy to victory. But Mother presented a strategic idea that leaned into this reality: The Hero’s Journey. Through using a popular storytelling framework, they helped us to understand how the ups and downs of NYC buying would allow us to hit all the main points of the buyer’s journey, embrace the emotion and drama of buying, and maintain our track record of a hyper-specific and realistic approach to showing life in New York City.
"Let the Journey Begin" captures all the conflicting feelings experienced throughout the epic odyssey of purchasing a home in New York City, in the dramatic style of Renaissance painting. Using an illustrative visual style felt like a nice continuation from our past work, and the Renaissance art was a perfect match for showing a buyer move from their call to adventure to their return home.
During the process of creating the look and feel for the campaign, Mother’s creative team experimented with different copy concepts. When they presented the idea for the artwork cards (also called object labels) we knew that was the right direction.
Although we explored directions that leaned more into painting tropes — for example, including a painted frame around the artwork — we decided the copy concept did all the heavy lifting needed to communicate the Renaissance painting concept, but in a more subtle and clever way. It also had flexibility to lean more epic in some instances, and more funny in others.
A lot of care went into deciding which neighborhoods were used in the campaign copy, and how well those paired with the art. Every team working on this campaign — StreetEasy, Mother, Buck — all obsessed over the neighborhood details. Are we seeing the accurate view of New Jersey based on where the ferry travels? Are we showing the most likely style of flooring and closet for a Greenpoint post-war? Is the architecture of the window right for Forest Hills?
This level of detail also went into an array of Easter eggs throughout the entire campaign. In the East Village scene alone, the team at Mother went on location to capture a specific intersection that could be recreated accurately. If you look closely, you’ll see the ubiquitous orange Mud coffee cup, Barcade, Whatever Tattoo, local personality Leh-Boy, and a flier for Dan Smith Will Teach You Guitar. These Easter eggs are fun for New Yorkers to see, but they also show that we truly know this city.
StreetEasy’s verbal identity is strategically flexible. We have many different types of audiences to talk to, and they each require a different nuanced verbal approach. As a brand that often uses highly conceptual creative concepts, we sometimes decide it’s more important to get the tone of the concept right and not shoehorn in an overly-restrictive brand voice just because it’s sitting in a PDF somewhere. For this year’s campaign, we embraced the fun of the Renaissance painting concept, while holding onto our usual wit and NYC expertise.
We tailor our voice to our different B2C and B2B audiences – but no matter the tone, we always want to communicate how StreetEasy is the trusted brand in NYC to help people make the city home. Whether explicit or implicit, we always want to show that StreetEasy truly understands New Yorkers and New York City real estate.
Jason Ferguson is Creative Director at StreetEasy.