Bodypaint marketing campaign for 100 Avenue A in East Village NYC

How do you sell a building that doesn’t exist?  How do you connect it to people?

My name is Ryan Serhant and I'm a real estate broker in New York City. I work for a company called Nest Seekers International and I first met Trina Merry when I sold the building in the East Village called 100 Avenue A and we filmed it for Million Dollar Listing New York. 

I knew that in New York City, in the new development market, there's so much competition I had to figure out a way to really stand out. What we decided was we needed to figure out a marketing campaign that immediately grabs our viewers' attention no matter who they are and immediately speaks to who the buyer could be. We thought about maybe just taking photos of different people who live in the East Village and maybe putting them in the renderings and we thought about doing a comic strip idea because East Village is cool and artsy and nice and fun. We thought about - oh man, we had like a thousand different ideas. 

And then we said, "You know what, there's this body painter named Trina Merry and she can paint people to blend in with their backgrounds. We're like, that's cool, but that's so crazy. How would that make any sense for us when we're selling a building?"

My developer, Magnum, wanted max prices than had never been sold before in that (East Village 7th & A) area- it was $1000/sq ft higher- and that falls on me as the broker to make that happen.  I needed something that could grab people’s immediate attention and reach the demographic of who the buyers could be.

Solution

Normally you would take a person and photograph them in the apartment or renderings but that is pretty boring and stale and wasn’t going to get the numbers my client wanted to achieve.  This particular campaign allowed us to take people who could ordinarily live in East Village and paint them into the background. Trina bodypainted people to blend into the renderings, finishes & neighborhood instead of stale renderings & also we wrapped the building in banners with the address of the building painted on nude bodies.  It was a fun way to take a harder look at a photo you would look at anyways.

Then we started thinking about it more and reached out to Trina and we gave her the renderings and kinda said, "What do you think?" and she had this amazing idea to paint models as they blended into the background of the renderings. 

So instead of just showing a rendering of the kitchen, a rendering of the bathroom, a rendering of the building, we literally had those renderings but kinda like magic eye, people's bodies were in them painted. And so, it grabbed everyone's attention. It was pretty wild and then we came up with a little idea of you know what, let's wrap the entire construction site as a huge banner with naked people painted in the address of the building and let's see if anyone notices. 

So we did that and everyone noticed and then we broke price records. There's a little bit of between there where people got a little bit angry and people were like, "Oh this is crazy! You can't sell buildings like this. Why would you ever do this? This is too risque. This is too sexy. You're taking advantage of people's bodies."

And then that went away in a heartbeat once we started getting pricing that just didn't make sense for the area because people all over the world - both in a viral and social media way and the print advertising, digital advertising way - those images really, really struck out and no one had ever done that before and they, honestly I think, helped bring us the amount of attention we needed to get record breaking pricing for a project in the East Village.