The Explore. Play. Grow. HudsonHeartbeat.com Lifestyle Branding Ad for Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty

It was decided that a major portion of the  marketing campaign for  HudsonHeartbeat.com branding would need to be focused on the Hudson Valley lifestyle. This ad was designed with the Luxury market in Westchester County in mind. After some exhaustive image research and a few other design comps we decided that we should down play screen grabs of the actual site. Instead Rand Realty’s owners wanted to present it as a lifestyle ad. This style actually ties in more with the typical branding ads produced by Realogy‘s Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate franchise branding.

Initially the design used an image of a laptop. However, the new iPad was so much fun that we though it would be more hip to use an iPad instead of a laptop and better reach our luxury audience. The main background photo of the Adirondack chairs, dock, and water is from iStockPhoto. Eric Ortner took a studio photo of an iPad matching it to the perspective of the iStockPhoto shot. He then superimposed a screen grab of the HudsonHeartbeat.com site into the iPad image in Adobe Photoshop. Mr. Ortner then used Photoshop to place the iPad image into the Adirondack Chair Image. Upon purchase of the Hi-Res Adirondack chair it became clear that additional retouching of the iStock Photo image was required. In addition to being distressed, the hi-res photos revealed that the chairs had a great deal of dirt and mildew on them. So Eric Ortner needed to “repaint” the chairs in Photoshop. Some careful selection, masking, feathering and layering eliminated the filth. The page layout’s, photo, logos and text were then all put together in Adobe InDesign.

This branding ad is being used extensively in local publications throughout New York’s Westchester the Hudson Valley. It has also been turned into a postcard and flyer.

Flyer Promoting the Hudson Heartbeat Video Contest

On April 1, 2011  Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty released its new lifestyle blog dedicated to Westchester and the Hudson Valley. The goal of the site was to further enhance Search Engine Optimization as well as awareness of  RandRealty.com by generating traffic from an audience that wasn’t necessarily looking to purchase real estate. One chief component of the site is user generated community profile videos in the spirit of social media. What better way to garner this sort of video content than through a video contest. The flyer above was designed to entice a youthful and creative audience to enter their work in the video contest. The flyer’s design also closely follows the general design system used for on-air advertising promoting Hudson Heartbeat. This was done to reinforce the sites brand identity. The flyer has been posted in colleges and areas where young creative types may be found. This design was created entirely in Adobe Illustrator and will also be used on postcards and possibly print ads.