Rethinking product storytelling: positioning REA Group as an innovator, from dial-up to AI.
Services
REA Group is Australia’s leading digital property business, home to realestate.com.au—the nation’s most visited real estate platform. In 2024, REA briefed Green Hat to develop the go-to-market campaign for NextGen Listings, the most significant innovation in Australian property advertising in over a decade.
NextGen Listings represents a bold reinvention of REA’s core product experience. Built using advanced AI and consumer insights, it redefines how listings work, look, and convert—setting a new benchmark not just for the local market, but at the level of the world’s most sophisticated digital platforms.
Green Hat was tasked with launching the first release to customers, developing a creative platform that captured the scale, ambition, and ongoing innovation of the initiative—while aligning with REA’s overarching customer CVP and creative platform, ‘Better is a Big Deal.’
REA needed a launch campaign that did justice to the scale of the NextGen innovation—and made it immediately meaningful to customers.
This wasn’t just a UX refresh. It was a future-facing rebuild of REA’s most valuable real estate—its listings. For the campaign to succeed, it had to translate technical upgrades into tangible business benefits and create excitement around a multi-phase innovation roadmap.
The campaign also needed to acknowledge a growing truth in the category: modern property seekers have high expectations shaped by global digital leaders. The storytelling had to speak to that audience indirectly—positioning NextGen as a smarter, faster, more connected experience that helps agents meet those expectations and get better results, faster.
And critically, the campaign had to be flexible enough to speak to both Residential and Developer customers while being ready to stretch across future product drops.
We developed a creative platform that was as confident as the product it supported—centred around a powerful idea: Better is our biggest update ever.
We developed a creative platform that was as confident as the product it supported—centred around a powerful idea: Better is our biggest update ever.
This positioning reframed the product evolution as a brand milestone—honouring REA’s leadership over 25 years while spotlighting this release as a major leap forward. The core creative brought that story to life through a nostalgic, high-energy timeline that fast-forwarded from dial-up era beginnings to today’s AI-powered listings.
The visual style was cinematic and dimensional—using a 3D animated timeline, archive UI from the Wayback Machine, and future-state prototypes. It ran across:
- A 45-second hero film (pre-and post-launch variants)
- A series of 15-second cutdowns highlighting key benefits
- Static assets and social formats for Residential and Developer audiences
- A dedicated app store video promo, spotlighting real UX in motion.
Crucially, the campaign was built on the strategic foundation of ‘Better is a Big Deal’, REA’s customer value proposition platform—ensuring creative continuity across brand experiences. The storytelling reinforced the idea that REA doesn’t just keep up with market expectations—it sets them.
- Widely adopted across REA’s owned and paid trade channels delivering reach to over 85% of total addressable audience.
- Drove 122% to target for Customer Marketing Centre visits and engagement with product feature content.
- REA’s internal teams praised the campaign for its clarity, originality, and commercial resonance, with direct positive impact on customer conversations leading into FY25.
- So well received that the Consumer division of REA commissioned a version of the same creative for public-facing campaigns—demonstrating the power and scalability of the core idea.
- The campaign platform has been retained as the foundation for future feature drops and phased product rollouts, reinforcing REA’s continued leadership in digital property innovation.
