CoStar Group, the $34 billion real estate analytics firm, hit its Super Bowl debut with four slick commercials Sunday night, buying more airtime than Pepsi and even perennial favorite Budweiser, which bought just two million slots in the biggest football. Night.
The ads — three for the CoStar Homes.com affiliate and one for another affiliate, Apartments.com — was just the beginning in a planned barrage of advertising for the pioneering home search portals. CoStar CEO Andy Florence said he hoped the media blitz would win the company dominance over competing home search sites. Last year, Homes.com announced it had reached 100 million monthly visitors, falling behind Zillow but placing it ahead of both Redfin and Realtor.com.
On its website, Homes.com touts a $1 billion marketing push, describing the investment as “the largest marketing campaign in real estate history.” In the weeks leading up to the big game, the site promises that “Homes.com will be everywhere from morning to night,” with an ongoing ad rollout that will include radio, streaming platforms and prime-time television.
The combined two minutes and 15 seconds of ads that aired while the Kansas City Chiefs battled the San Francisco 49ers likely cost $35 million, according to Ad Age. The four commercials were anchored by celebrities Jeff Goldblum, Dan Levy and Heidi Gardner, with a cameo from rapper Lil Wayne, whose alter egos negotiated with aliens and broke the windows of a high-rise office building with an extra-large champagne cork. . In each piece, the actors wreaked havoc on residential communities while performing neighborhood identification for prospective homebuyers. And in not one but two of the ads, Mr. Levy and Ms. Gardner escaped danger in a Homes.com-branded helicopter, its blades twirling and hovering over a football game and a quiet cul-de-sac.
It’s a bid that’s likely to pay off, advertising experts said Monday.
“Companies sometimes make the mistake of running a Super Bowl ad and then disappearing,” said Mitch Burg, former president of both MediaEdge, a media buying firm, and the Television Syndicate Association. “If you do that, your name recognition will also disappear. But if you’re participating in the Super Bowl as part of launching a campaign that you plan to sustain, then it’s a very smart way to approach it.”
And for a cash-strapped company, pulling four ads rather than just one can have an impact, Mr. Burg said.
“If you break down the ads, beyond Dan Levy and Heidi Gardner and Jeff Goldblum, really what they kept bringing it back to was simple: name recognition,” he said.
CoStar, which acquired Apartments.com in 2014, added Homes.com in 2021. Since then, the company has been actively courting both realtors and homebuyers while keeping its nose — and its deep pockets — at competitors.
Mr. Florance, who founded CoStar in a dorm room in 1986, refers to a trio of competing sites — Zillow, Realtor.com and Redfin — as “Ziltorfin” and accused them of using bait-and-switch tactics to lure in home buyers and then sell their contact information to dozens of anonymous real estate agents.
Zillow representatives declined to comment. In a company statement, Realtor.com said, “We love competition, it makes us better.”
Alina Ptaszynski, a spokeswoman for Redfin, pointed out that unlike Redfin, agents are charged fees to advertise on Homes.com. He said that while brokerages and the National Association of Realtors face legal challenges over commission rates, high marketing budgets would only drive up their costs.
“The billions spent on Lil Wayne and all that Super Bowl extravagance is just a sideshow if it’s not helping people move on to a better life,” he said. “And with these huge lawsuits over high brokerage fees, the real question is: Who’s paying it? Agents spend thousands a month to appear on these portals, a cost that is passed on to the consumer.”
In November, at the flagship real estate conference for the National Association of Realtors, CoStar sponsored the largest booth in the exhibit hall at the Anaheim Convention Center, put its logo on agent buses and hosted a private, free Goo Goo Dolls concert for attendees .
The Super Bowl ad market was the most recent disaster.
In an interview with The New York Times in December, Mr. Florance recalled dining with Mr. Levy in London and laughed about a 2021 sketch on Saturday Night Live that featured Mr. Levy and Ms. Gardner. In it, several SNL cast members scrolled through Zillow.com late at night in a manner akin to phone sex, and were then bombarded with calls from real estate agents.
In those locations, Mr. Florance said, “Typically you’re sold as a lead to some unrelated agent,” resulting in homebuyers being bombarded with cold phone solicitations. “This is a bad customer experience,” he added. “As a real estate agent, you don’t want Saturday Night Live to parody the consumer experience.”
At the time, Rich Barton, CEO of Zillow, illuminated by the innervation on the site formerly known as Twitter, writing, “Wait. We did marketing @zillow wrong all these years?’