The real estate market is constantly in flux, with sale prices and interest rates often changing overnight.
Real estate advertisers need to be able to shift spend in a hurry, which historically has been a big hurdle, according to Neil Golson, VP of brand and creative at Realtor.com.
To generate ad creative more quickly across a wider array of channels, Realtor.com has been working with AI-based ad startup BrandComms.AI.
The startup, which was founded in Australia in 2024 and launched in the US on Wednesday, aims to prevent human strategy and insight from getting lost in the “messy middle” between agency and brand, Chief AI Officer Isobell Roberts told AdExchanger.
Speeding ahead
BrandComms.AI was born out of insights consultancy Forethought.
The connection gives BrandComms.AI access to 30 years of proprietary training data, which it uses to train its predictive models on which factors are likeliest to drive creative success, like certain imagery or messages.
For years, Realtor.com’s creative marketing strategy mainly revolved around influencer posts and user-generated content like testimonials, said Golson. It was “very inexpensive to source and produce,” he said, and most of the budget went toward amplifying the content on social media.
Now, Realtor.com is able to accomplish “big marketing at low cost,” as Golson put it, and advertise across more channels. In particular, it’s been finding success with TV advertising, particularly when an ad includes an immediate call to action, like calling a phone number or visiting a webpage.
BrandComms.AI lets Realtor.com “do more, faster,” Golson said, pointing to quicker production and access to additional data, channels and content formats as the partnership’s “biggest unlocks,” he said.
The ability to generate new content quickly is particularly important when reacting to real-time market changes.
If mortgage interest rates suddenly drop, for instance, Realtor.com needs to respond and generate relevant ads quickly because, by the following week, the rates might be back to normal, said Golson.
Real estate agents 🤝 AI agents
BrandComms.AI blends market data with a company’s own assets and data to help generate more effective ads that resonate with a brand’s target audience.
Roberts described the strategy as a “communications triple play” or a three-pronged approach that includes one emotional driver and two rational drivers.
For instance, Realtor.com targeted new home sellers by focusing on reducing their anxiety (an emotion-based goal) while also providing resources to inform them about the selling journey and simplifying the process of finding a real estate agent to work with (which are rational or data-based goals).
Realtor.com found that sellers have a “massive fear of screwing up,” Golson said, in terms of marketing their homes and choosing the best realtor.
This common experience of anxiety wasn’t discovered with AI, though. Brand strategists figured that out through a mix of qualitative and quantitative customer research, said Golson.
Realtor.com uploaded this research, along with transcripts from client interviews and previous creative content and testing, to the BrandComms.AI platform, which generated a digital twin of Realtor.com’s target audience along with a series of ad concepts.
BrandComms.AI created a full draft of the ad Realtor.com wanted to run with, and its marketing team had the opportunity to provide feedback. Once the final version was approved, Realtor.com pushed it out across channels.
Rinse and repeat this process, and you have a fully fledged campaign.
According to Roberts, the BrandComms.AI platform integrates multiple AI models and uses an assessment tool to determine the best model for each task.
The models are constantly updating and have their own strengths and weaknesses, Roberts said, which is why BrandComms.AI works “across the whole spectrum of what’s hot right now.”
Remaining model-agnostic is “really important,” she said, as it allows BrandComms.AI to grow and evolve alongside the models themselves.
