Andrew Strickman: Building Strong, Memorable Brands and Business Value Through Storytelling and Content
Andrew Strickman developed a way to use experience, stories, and content to turn realtor.com into the fastest growing digital real estate website.
Andrew Strickman has built his career on storytelling. While he knows the term is both overused and ill-defined these days, he began his career in journalism where he developed narrative instincts that he continued to use after segueing into the nascent digital world.
Strickman recently sat down with The Continuum to discuss why consumer storytelling is the true measure of brand strength, the power of empathy for marketing leaders, and how to sell real estate services with Cirque du Soleil.
You started working with influencers in the early days of the internet. How did you decide to do that?
At the turn of the millennium, we built Ammo Marketing around the philosophy that the brands that win are those whose consumers tell the best stories, and I still think that rings true today. Everyone has that one person you call when you're thinking about buying a car or choosing the best password service to use. Everybody's got that phone-a-friend. So we began looking for consumers in the real world whose credibility to recommend products served as their form of social capital. The hope was that if we had found the right people, and generally we did, their recommendations would turn into stories, which would turn into this new form of word-of-mouth marketing.
Were you calling them influencers back then?
We were calling them influencers, but unlike today they were not badging themselves as influencers. They just thought it was super cool that a brand wanted to deliver beer to their house every week for three months, or that Volvo wanted to give them a car for two weeks that they could drive anywhere they wanted in the country.
I think the fulcrum for the term “influencer,” and calling yourself an influencer, was the Kardashians and the advent of creators on YouTube. Influencer marketing in the social realm really took off when Kim Kardashian started getting paid to promote things online, and when Michelle Phan’s makeup tutorials took off.
You then moved to the brand side at realtor.com. How did you approach brand building at a very search-driven business?
I was really lucky. When I arrived, there was a reinvigorated executive team with a deep interest in seeing what marketing could do to drive consumer awareness and behavior.
I came into an environment where there had been limited attention paid to building the realtor.com brand with consumers, in part because in the early days of the internet, it was the first and only game in town for online real estate search. For many years, realtor.com was the most-trafficked real estate search tool. Then Trulia and Zillow came along, operating under that grow-at-all-costs mindset, and they understood that the way to differentiate themselves and stand apart was to build their brands. Realtor.com sort of got left behind.
You know there are cycles to executive beliefs about marketing, and about brand versus performance. Right now, we're in a cycle of transition where new founders and executives at start-ups think that they have to grow exponentially year-over-year. That has been the Silicon Valley investor drumbeat for so long: growth at all costs. You don't even need to turn a profit. Many believe the only way to grow is by pouring money into performance marketing, but I’m a brand builder at heart.
I really believe in the power of brands. Jeff Bezos once said that a brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room. I still believe that is true. I'd argue that ultimately, over the lifespan of successful business, the stronger your brand is, the less you spend in marketing. Thankfully, the team in place when I arrived at realtor.com was ready to understand that.
“The philosophy we built the agency on was that the brands that win are those whose consumers tell the best stories, and I still think that rings true today.”
Realtor.com cultivated a cheeky, approachable tone and brand presence. What was your process for finding that brand voice?
Our first agency partner was Pereira O’Dell and their pitch included a slide demonstrating how using humor in your advertising had a really positive impact on the business even with very serious brands like Charles Schwab, E-Trade, or State Farm Insurance. That stuck with me.
We leaned into humor from our very first national campaigns. Over the years, we re-evaluated “humor” to focus on “wit,” which I define as intelligent humor. We were never making jokes just for the sake of making jokes. Instead, we were trying to make people think about serious topics in a light-hearted way that made it easier to understand.
While many of the online real estate players were using emotion to tug at consumers’ heartstrings, we wanted to be different. We conducted a fair amount of research on advertising effectiveness with Ipsos and we constantly monitored brand linkage among other metrics. If someone remembered seeing an unbranded version of our ad, and someone had also seen our competitors’ ads, could they tell you which ad was for which company? Realtor.com consistently scored higher than any of our competitors, in part because we had really set ourselves apart and defined our own lane.
How did consumer insights inform the way you shifted the brand toward content?
We started to discover that there were people coming to realtor.com for lots of reasons that weren't specifically to buy a home or to sell a home. At any given time, there are only about 4 or 5 million homes for sale in the United States. When I started we had about 18 million unique users coming to the site each month and when I left that number was close to 95 million unique users, even though the number of homes for sale stayed relatively stable.
We spent a lot of time figuring out why these people were coming to the site, what they were looking for, whether they were finding it, and if we could hold onto them. We needed to know if we could create a strong enough brand and a strong enough product experience that we would not only hold their attention in that moment, but ultimately that positive experience would bring them back to us when they were ready to buy or sell.
“I'd argue that ultimately, over the lifespan of successful business, the stronger your brand is the less you spend in marketing.”
So what did you learn? Why were so many people not in the real estate market coming to your site?
Home interiors inspiration. Renovation inspiration. The entertainment value of learning what someone else’s home was worth or what the person down the street got when they sold their house. There was also a real hunger for information. In my early days at the company I was responsible for building an editorial team from the ground up. The team was charged with delivering a combination of news, insights, and education about home buying, home selling, home management, and finances. The editorial team was six people by the time we were acquired by News Corp in 2014, and then they grew to 20.
In the early days, we spent a fair amount of money on paid content syndication, and that drove a lot of traffic. By the time I left the news and insights section of the website was averaging something like 8 to 10 million unique users a month, and through smart editorial management, successful SEO, and strong word of mouth, we dramatically decreased our dependence on paid content syndication.
“The best brand-funded content these days is shining a light on really interesting, untold stories, often documentary-style, that really gets to the heart of the human condition. When a brand can do so in a way that incorporates some component of what they do or how they do it, that's very valuable.”
You’re a long-time advocate for branded content. Where did branded content fit into realtor.com’s mix?
I prefer the term “brand-funded content” because I think a lot of the best brand storytelling out there has limited exposure for the brand who's paying to produce it. We were constantly looking for new ways to reach our audience with creativity and intelligence and wit, and it was pretty successful.
We were already the preferred site for repeat home-buyers — they came to us 2 to 1 over our competitors — so we knew that the audience we needed to reach was first time home-buyers who, at the time, were largely Millennials. We knew that they weren't watching TV, or at least they weren’t watching it through traditional ‘appointment viewing.’ They were streaming on Hulu. They were catching up on YouTube.
So, we started content partnerships with other brands that had audiences we wanted to reach. We tried to partner in really creative and effective ways, telling stories and demonstrating the value of realtor.com by demonstrating the importance of home through the lens of those partner brands.
For instance, we partnered with Cirque du Soleil, a circus (people certainly scratched their heads about that one). The talent in their shows are people who are constantly on the road. We wanted to tell the story of what home looks like to someone who never really has a place to hang their hat. There were also members of their traveling show that were moving into a residence at Disney World. For the first time in their life, they were thinking about buying a home, and we followed them on that journey.
Beyond the Block, a multi-season full-length TV show produced with Tastemade, was another great opportunity for us. Ninety-nine percent of that show was about our core talent, a Realtor named Andrew Tyree, who took homebuyers in markets all over the country through the journey of finding the home that was right for them. The focus was on the neighborhood that they choose to live in, and the cultural experiences that make that neighborhood unique. This was brand-funded content, but it was subtle. Yes, there were definitely shots of people using our tools in realistic ways, but the only other time you saw Realtor.com was in the title card where it said “presented by.” That show drove enormous awareness among first-time homebuyers and great traffic to our site, not only through the content directly, but how we and Tastemade marketed the show to potential viewers.
How have you seen brand-funded content evolve?
The best brand-funded content these days is shining a light on really interesting, untold stories, often documentary-style, that really gets to the heart of the human condition. When a brand can do so in a way that incorporates some component of what they do or how they do it, that's very valuable. When a brand pays for a piece of content, and just sticks their beer bottles into some gratuitous hero shots on a beach, it's not the same thing. Our goal was always to create this connective tissue between the partners we were working with and our brand without ever hitting anyone over the head with a branded message.
Any project we initiated was launched with a clear hypothesis of the value it would generate, and a plan in place for how to measure if we were correct — which our finance team clearly appreciated. Ultimately, we got pretty good at figuring out what we should be measuring and what the outcomes would actually look like.
I do think that measurement with brand-funded content continues to be an enormously fraught conversation. Brand Storytelling, a trade organization I advise, just launched a massive research-driven effort with academic rigor to evaluate the range of ways this kind of content can be measured. We hope to build a series of models that brands can utilize to define and measure value back to their businesses.
In a time when becoming an influencer is a career aspiration, do you think “selling out” is still relevant to consumers?
Today’s consumers kind of have a different notion of selling out. Almost like global football fans —they know there are going to be sponsor logos everywhere, so they don't they don't feel taken out of that entertainment experience by the brand involvement or the commercial break.
Formula One is a great example. Before Netflix’s F1: Drive to Survive premiered a few years ago, Formula One had a small-ish global audience, probably half a million broadcast viewers per race. That audience has exponentially increased since the show. There is a real value that brands can get when they partner with organizations and franchises that have a really passionate audience, and I think that Formula One proves that out week after week.
May 16, 2023
