Boston Realty Hub Stuff
these are some cafe card designs for the website www.onmarketboston.com.
the monochrome LESS IS MORE is the back of all the cards; i’ve tweaked the design to make it less opaque, and knocked the numbers down from 10 to 5 agencies, as there are more small agencies and since craig has throttled the ad posting fewer agents would be posting every property. 50 to 12,500 is dramatic enough. thats a ratio of 250 to 1.
the front of the card is supposed to catch interest long enough to see the phrase ‘better than craigslist.” flipping over the card is supposed to tell you why we are better than CL.
card back:
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
This is great! The middle one is my favorite!
The photos and stuff are good, however, i think that keeping craigslist out of the ads is a better idea. Products say, “better than the other leading brands,” for example. They don’t mention who the competitor is. Its just suggested.
I hear what you’re saying. We had this experience of doing the press release without mentioning CL and getting no response, however. I think that most people hear about the hub and they think, “Oh, that’s nice, but really, everyone uses craigslist because it has the most listings.”
What I want to do with the cards is to see what kind of bump we get with analytics to the OMB site traffic, and to try out different messages. You’re making me think we should do a CL free card, so I can test my theory. I’m happy to be wrong if we can just figure it out and move forward; the press release experience indicated that without a reference to CL nobody was interested in the hub; we don’t know if we had included the CL language if anyone would have replied, either, of course.
you go to the hub, you do a search, and you get 50 results; you go to CL and you do a search and you get 500 or 1000; if that is as far as your knowledge goes, I think what you do at that point is never come back to the hub again during your search because it’s too small. Unless you figure out the redundancy thing.
I may well be overthinking it. We could do the brand-x language, and everyone would know, I guess, what we are talking about; we could figure out some cute way of referring to craigslist that is less likely to piss him off. Thatguyslist. Unorderedlist. “bulletine board style list sites.” The thing is that everyone really only uses the one.
I’m gonna talk to anthony about this and a few other people before we go to press. thanks for your feedback, cassandra.
it’s mine too. I cut the copy severely; I have this weird voice in my head that talks about what it is to be young and to move to a city, or to live in a city, and all that that means, both good and bad. I like the idea of saying that the city is great, the city is horrible, but you have to live here because your’e this brave special person doing this amazing thing, living your life, and now it is time to be in this place. And we can help. Because city apartments suck. anyone with any kind of comparison from a suburb or anywhere else is just going to be horrified as they encounter this market. So rather than blow smoke up peoples ass and say, ‘wow, we can get you a great place to live for cheap,’ when the reality is no one can, i am trying to say, ‘we will help you in this awesome, cool, and scary endeavor.’
the ‘dark but full of diamonds’ line is from the end of Death of a Salesmen, where the protagonist kills himself to get his family the insurance money. I always loved the line (the jungle is dark, but full of diamonds, is the real line.)
I have anice shot of the back door at TT the Bears i want to do one with, too, something like “WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?” The door is crusted with snow and crawling with bright grafitti and I’ve juiced up the saturation so it’s crazy looking.
I like the last one the best since it has some real PUNCH to it with its color RED ,which always catches ones eye, and looks PATRIOTIC!
Number One is nice but it does not get your message across.
The Second One where Less is More is geared to real estate agents and could be used in a realtor magazine.
The Third One – The City is Young – is visually pretty but again it does not grab your attention since it initially appears to be a restaurant ad.
My opinion for whatever it is worth since I was not a marketing major.
Aunt Bonnie