Apartment Marketers Find Value in AI-Generated Video Ads

Apartment marketers are finding the costs are down and the effectiveness is up when it comes to producing short, streaming television advertisement videos using artificial intelligence (AI) production methods.

What used to take thousands of dollars and days if not weeks to produce can now be composed in minutes by using still photos and videos in the clip.

The approach involves video serving called, “programmatic advertising,” which uses advertising technology to buy and sell digital ads. Programmatic advertising serves up relevant ad impressions to audiences through automated steps, in less than a second.

Kate Good, Partner and SVP of Apartment Development for Hunington Residential in Houston said that one of her video campaigns led someone to search online for the featured community, which then enabled Hunington to send other apartment community videos to that person’s feed, highlighting a variety of aspects.

She and Annie Wildasin, Senior Director of Marketing, Bozzuto, spoke about video production platforms such as OpenAI, Sora, and Apartmentgeofencing.com, during a session held May 10 at the Apartment Innovation and Marketing Conference in Huntington Beach, Calif.

“Given that 42% of rental searches come from those who live out of town, according to Erica Byrum of Apartments.com, video is taking on greater importance and value,” Good said.

“Videos are much more memorable for consumers than a flat image today. Studies show that 54% of videos are retained, on average. And you can share a video in a post or an email.

Good said she spent $3,800 on streaming TV ads and ran 41,000 commercials, with a 98% viewing completion rate, netting 25 walk-ins.

Comparatively, it can cost about $695 to create one video using images only. It costs more than $2,000 for one, 30-second video with footage shot onsite. Wait times to complete videos sometimes are as long as 14 days.

“It’s quite the time suck but if you use AI video, the process is much more efficient,” Wildasin said. “It takes just a few minutes.”

On average, mute and pause rates on these streaming ads are well below 1%.

Wildasin said Bozzuto is seeing up to a 50% lead-to-apply rate on some of their videos.

She said the 19 signed leases attributed to its virtual tours netted $1.2 million and the company’s $10,645 investment in video over 25 months resulted in 108 times ROI.

Bozzuto is also producing micro videos (short video clips) that help residents learn more about the community such as “meet the team,” a quick look at amenities, maintenance tips for renters, and how to arrive at the community, such as where to park in some of its urban properties.

Overcoming Video Fatigue

By producing many differing versions, apartment companies can overcome video fatigue, which leads to uninterested viewers.

There’s a big decline at the seven-day mark of seeing the same video; recovery is gradual. There’s a big decline again at the 24-day mark and there’s less recovery. There’s no significant improvement after the 29-day mark.

“We can avoid creative fatigue with little effort and small budgets,” Good said.

“Some people have said you don’t want to show your apartment community’s front signage in your videos, but we found that it’s very effective to do so. It sort of legitimizes the properties’ existence,” Good said.