Grounded in Brookland

The Bozzuto Group builds and sells homes across the mid-Atlantic, and in late 2015 it had forty-five new townhomes going up on the Brookland Arts Walk in Northeast DC, next to the Metro. Bozzuto sells homes by selling neighborhoods, and Brookland had a story of its own to tell before anyone mentioned a building.

The campaign it asked for had to introduce the homes to the neighborhood as Brookland-first: one idea that could run on Metro signage, mailers, the sales office and the local press, and that the next building could open on without paying to have it made again. We answered with one line run three ways, a stamp badge, and photographs made in the neighborhood.

The badge does double duty. Over a photograph, on signage or a mailer or the Metro image, it reads as a postmark; on a plain printed page it reads as a stamp from the sales office. A heart sits at the top, then "GROUNDED" on one line and "IN BROOKLAND" on the next, framed by a rule and set in tall narrow capitals. Because it had to hold its proportions at six feet and at fridge-magnet size, everything else in the campaign followed from that one requirement.

The whole campaign turns on swapping one word: "Grounded in Community," "Grounded in Culture," "Grounded in History." Each version sits on a photograph made in Brookland, an outdoor backgammon game on the grass, the local record store, a religious procession moving through a DC crowd, and each one carries the same darkening layer, the same badge, and the same coral rule under the pillar word.

The line also works away from the artwork, which is the part that outlasts the launch. Bozzuto can open the next building, and the one after that, from the same starting position without paying to have the idea made again.

The buy put the campaign across the city: full-page Grounded in Culture ads in the Washington City Paper and the Washington Blade, banner sets on washingtonpost.com and PoPville, and a six-foot sign on the site itself selling the neighborhood before the building. Every placement carried the same badge and the same coral rule under the same offer, new 3 and 4 bedroom townhomes two blocks from the Red Line.

Bozzuto sells homes by selling neighborhoods, and the Brookland campaign handed the sales office, the brokers, and the buyers an argument they could carry into the room. Everyone led with the Arts Walk, the record store, the procession on the sidewalk. The Gallery Townhomes came second, in a place the buyer had already been sold on.