Solution #559

Knowing Your Community Association

Featuring: “Your Home, Your Investment” – TV Spot
Client: Smith & Harroff and Community Associations Institute (CAI)

The Idea:

Create a TV-Spot to lead homeowners to CAI’s new website, ResponsibleCommunities.com where they can gain valuable information about their homeowner’s association, training & certification in how to be an effective community association, and how to get actively involved in their community.

The Challenge:

The main challenge was coming up with away to showcase the many facets of community associations from apartments, condos, townhouses, to single-family communities. Second challenge was the time of year of this production, which was winter. The DC Area was dealing with snowstorms and snow-covered communities which made it impractical area in which to shoot this commercial. We also didn’t want to dwell on just one region of the country, but to showcase all climates from East to West Coasts plus North and South. The spot needed to be evergreen and to be able to have a long shelf life.

The Solution:

CAI’s public relations firm, Smith & Harroff, and Video Solutions teamed up to produce this TV commercial. Smith & Harroff wrote the script with some consulting with Video Solutions. It was determined that we needed a spokesperson to talk through the reasons for contacting CAI and then end with a representative of the new CAI website, Responsible Communities.com. Originally, the plan was to have our talent appear in a variety of locations to illustrate the many different types of communities and attributes of homeowner associations. However, this would get costly to showcase the talent in a couple of different styles of communities and would limit us to one geographic area and therefore, lack diversity. We decided to film the talent against a chromakey backdrop and to develop a graphical virtual reality-style background. On screen, it looks like our spokesperson is walking through a video gallery featuring several types of communities & services, and ends up standing next to the Home Page of the new website. Video Solutions help cast the talent, selected all of the background footage, developed original 3D background graphics, and assembled and edited the final spot.

The Result:

The client ended up with a 30-second commercial that has aired in several parts of the country all designed to draw more attention to the client’s website and their resources. This TV Spot has a reasonable long shelf life and should work for several years. This has led to a series of radio spots with a similar message.

Industry Honors:

2016 Silver Communicator Award