Stories about Prague’s neighborhoods sparked interest in a totally new part of the Czech capital

We’ve conducted a collection of case studies featuring award-winning native advertising examples. This blog post features The Best Use of Native Advertising on a Small Budget.

Introduction

Campaign: Living Neighbourhoods
Brand: Crestyl
Agency: Seznam Brand Studio, The Czech Republic

Crestyl develops and builds apartment houses in the brownfields of the Czech capital Prague. It had already completed the apartment houses DOCK at a lucrative address. This time, however, it wanted to lure people a bit further away from the city centre.

Crestyl needed to get people interested in living in the borough of Hagibor. But here’s the rub: the area was not so familiar even to the natives of Prague and it was hardly the most attractive city location. How could it introduce the public to the Hagibor project and entice potential buyers?

The Content

Seznam Brand Studio came up with a creative concept rooted in Crestyl’s own philosophy: they don’t just build houses, they build “living neighbourhoods”. Its strategy was to introduce the public to the idea that Hagibor was a Prague quarter awaiting a great transformation. Just as other attractive quarters had changed over the years, Hagibor was about to follow in their pulsating footsteps.

To convince the public, Seznam decided to give an intimate view of Prague’s different quarters. It talked to residents who live in the different neighbourhoods and who are important parts of the local communities. It interviewed the organisers of a farmers’ market and told the story of a popular neighbourhood bar.

The studio also talked with architects and urbanists about what needed improving to make Prague an even more pleasant place to live and how the transformation of cities actually happens. Last but not least, it described the area of Hagibor and the residential projects planned for this developing city quarter.

To explain why Hagibor was a good choice, Seznam conveyed its idea in a native format - an article enriched with graphics. The studio used the gradual colouring of photographs to invoke the idea of life returning to the quarters. It also used pulsating lines and other animation elements distributed on the website to further emphasize the “living” aspect.

Distribution

The content was published on Seznam Zprávy, the most trustworthy news website in the Czech Republic after the state media. It was chosen because the readers’ expectations match the intention of the studio’s work: to inform, to go deeper, to do proper journalism.

The content was also shared on Seznam’s own websites. For its month-long promotion, the studio created several classical article teasers with different headlines, descriptions and images.

The article was also shared on the Seznam Zprávy Facebook profile.

The Results

The article succeeded in doubling its target number of readers. It:

received 132,756 views - including 106,016 unique readers. Readers spent, on average, four times longer on the article than on editorial articles and more than double the original target.
generated 6,798 direct click-throughs to the Crestyl website - from the link that had been placed at the end of the article with the text “I want to live in Hagibor”.

Click-throughs from the article became the main source of visitor traffic on Crestyl’s website for the month of August in 2019. This increased number of visits was matched with a 100% increase in the number of inquiries in the same month.

Crestyl estimates that leads from the campaign accounted for 20% of its total sales.

Take Note

Despite its small budget, Seznam was determined to create content captivating enough to not just raise awareness about Hagibor but actually get people interested in living there. How did it do this?

Realising the text need not be overly commercial for it to meet marketing objectives.
Knowing human interest stories work as a magnet for readers.
By including several Prague neighbourhoods, the article managed to attract readers who might otherwise have been disinterested had the content focussed purely on Hagibor.
Lively graphics and a readable text helped keep the reader engaged with the content for a long time.