How do you make buying a house look cool to people who probably aren’t considering buying a house right now?
Put cool people in a house that is for sale and let them talk about how cool houses can be. At least, that’s what Zillow did when it put five Snapchat-famous personalities under one roof in Malibu.
The result is three YouTube episodes of people filming themselves with each other’s phones, and some documentary footage.
The show is hosted by Harris Markowitz, founder of A Cereal Production (ACP). ACP produces micro-content for brands meant for social media consumption. He’s been quite successful in this venture and has produced multiple videos for Zillow offering tips (otherwise known as “life-hacks”) for homeowners.
In a recent video, he explained how to turn a lemon into a seed planter.
“The contract said we were gonna shoot a documentary and reality TV show,” said Danny Berk, 22. “We thought it was going to be minor, but it was hectic.”
The five Snapchat stars include Berk (@dannyberk), Mike Platco (@mplatco), Sallia Goldstein (@salliasnap), Christine Mi (@Miologie), and Aaron Martinez (@aaronfps). The goal was to bring these Snapchat content creators together to create stories with each other.
In Snapchat land, this is critical mass. Berk and Mi use a fleeting moment of a whale sighting off the home’s balcony to create a Berk-narrated reenactment starring a whale drawn on the screen by Mi.
The Snapchatters answer basic questions about what makes a home, what they look for in a home, and what a home means to them. Answers range from “a big kitchen,” to “my dog.”
An art project is deployed early on and circled back to at the end of the show when they describe their work and hang it on the refrigerator. Some of the guests’ Snapchat art has been featured on media outlets like Buzzfeed, CNN, CNBC and more.
“The best part was just to be able to stay at the house and include all these Snapchatters in my video,” Berk said. “We are all different in our own way.”
Snapchat has approximately 100 million daily users, according to CEO Evan Spiegel. The average user spends between 20 and 30 minutes in the application everyday.
