Century 21 back in the Super Bowl as TV advertiser

Citing a worthwhile return on investment for this year's Super Bowl TV ad spend and a recovering housing market, Century 21 Real Estate LLC announced it will run TV ads for the second year in a row during the big game, set for Feb. 3, 2013, in New Orleans.

The high-profile TV advertising campaign announcement continues an eventful, jam-packed year of multimedia advertising for the franchisor, which earlier this year claimed to be the first real estate brokerage in 21 years to run a TV spot during the Super Bowl. Featured on NBC, that Feb. 5 game in Indianapolis garnered more than 100 million TV viewers.

"We received far more media impressions than we thought," said Beverly Thorne, chief marketing officer at Century 21. The firm received more media impressions in the six weeks surrounding the game than it had in the 12 months previous, Thorne said.

Thorne attributes a portion of the sustained 40 percent year-to-date, year-over-year increase in traffic to Century 21's website to the campaign.

The Super Bowl ads will air on CBS next year and continue Century 21's "Smarter, Bolder, Faster" ad campaign -- developed as part of the firm's 40-year anniversary in 2011 -- where the firm touts those attributes in its agents, Thorne said.

This year's Super Bowl campaign featured Century 21 agents besting TV personality and real estate mogul Donald Trump, National Football League Hall of Famer Deion Sanders, and U.S. Olympic speed-skating gold medalist Apolo Ohno in three different 30-second ads.

In addition to running an ad during the game itself, Century 21 is sponsoring an hour of the game's pregame show, where the firm's branding will be part of the show's staging and be introduced into the content sometime in that hour, Thorne said.

"One of the reasons we're going back in 2013, because we saw so much success in 2012," Thorne said. The firm also wants to take advantage of the turning housing market. "We want to make sure our agents are front and center" as real estate action picks up, Thorne said.

Reflecting the depressed housing market and a changing media landscape, Century 21 had temporarily suspended its national TV advertising in 2009. In March 2011, the company announced its big-time re-entry into the TV market when it released its Super Bowl 46 ad plans.

The Super Bowl play continues a busy year of advertising for the company, which, in addition to the Super Bowl TV ads, sponsored U.S. Soccer, ran TV ads during this summer's Olympics, launched an Internet radio ad campaign on Pandora and ran a Facebook-based gaming ad campaign.

According to Williamsburg, Va.-based research firm Borrell Associates Inc., real estate advertising on broadcast TV will represent just 6.3 percent of the industry's total projected ad spend of $23.69 billion in 2012. That proportion is down from 8.4 percent in 2011; that year saw $28.34 billion in real estate ad spending, 19.6 percent higher than 2012's projected total.