RoomPlace multi-media launch takes Indianapolis by storm

A couple toasts each other by candlelight, while sitting on milk crates. A young woman greets the morning, waking up on the floor. A young man balances a TV on his knee while sitting on a lawn chair in his home. These are all scenarios The Yaffe Group used to introduce the Indianapolis area to their newest furniture store chain, The RoomPlace. The humorous multi-media campaign featured people who really need new furniture and told them to hang on, because help was on the way. Both outdoor and teaser TV spots drove people to go to the website to get more information.

Commercial 1 Commercial 2

The RoomPlace is based out of Chicago, where they are known as The RoomPlace at Harlem Furniture. This is their first expansion into a new market, with two stores opening up in the Indianapolis metro market in beginning months of 2009. The campaign kicked off with 100 outdoor postings throughout the metro area. Four different images featured people who really needed furniture and a headline that was a variation on “Need furniture?”

The outdoor then featured a large web address www.indyroomplace.com.This took people to a micro site Yaffe created to avoid confusion that might happen if the new market went to the corporate site where the logo and name has the Harlem Furniture attachment. The micro site explains that help is coming soon to Indianapolis and tells a little of the RoomPlace story. Once customers have seen that, they can move through to the corporate site.

The outdoor boards were followed several weeks later by four :15 TV teaser spots that featured live action footage depicting some of the same scenarios as the outdoor, including a middle aged couple watching TV together sitting in an empty room on lawn chairs. Like the outdoor, the TV asked the various “need furniture” questions followed up by the statement “help is on the way” and the web address. The first weekend that the TV broke, traffic to the site went up over 1000%.

The multi-media concerted effort broke through the clutter and greatly increase awareness of the new store in Indianapolis without spending a huge amount of money on an expensive campaign. You can view the teaser spots in the podcast section of www.yaffetidbits.com.