How Anywhere Real Estate Rendered Hundreds Of Personalized Videos In A Matter Of Minutes

For this project, our client was a large real estate services company. Anywhere is home to some of the most recognized names and is the largest franchisor of residential real estate brands in the world.

The marketing team at Anywhere approached us to help with creating a workflow that will enable them to personalize several hundred videos for their franchisees – with little manual work.

The Project

Anywhere creates a plethora of marketing materials for their franchisees. In this case, instead of using a one-size-fits-all ad for a new marketing campaign, they integrated opportunities for customization — making it relevant to the franchisee’s local market. This included the company name, URL, and location. 

The Main Goal

The goal was efficiency. Previously, their marketing team would manually insert company names and URLs. This resulted in additional render hours and resources that could have been spent on other initiatives.

Naturally, they began searching for a more efficient and faster workflow. That’s where Plainly came in. A powerful tool that could remove nearly all of this manual work.

The Challenges

When executing manually, Anywhere used Adobe After Effects, the industry standard for creating all things digital content. 

To speed things up, they needed a video automation tool to be: 

• Compatible with Adobe After Effects (the industry standard)
• Cloud-based
• Powerful enough to handle large volume 

However, above all else, Anywhere needed something that would work without code, through CSVs and native integrations — something that has an intuitive workflow for non-technical creatives.

The Solution

Plainly easily met all of these requirements. Anywhere contacted us, and they completed the project self-serve. Plainly was just there to provide support.

They created an amazing After Effects template and then used Google Sheets to drive the video rendering. Finally, they used Plainly’s Google Drive integration to send the finished videos to Google Drive.

Here’s an example of the video for their Better Homes and Gardens® Real Estate franchisee in Tulsa:

And here’s an example of another version, localized for Fresno:

Instead of spending 15-30 minutes per video, their team was able to render hundreds of videos in a matter of minutes, and they were impressed. 

The Implementation

As mentioned, the implementation was fast and straightforward. Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of how Anywhere did it:

1. Their creative team created the template in After Effects
2. They completed the setup in Plainly — uploaded the After Effects template and chose the dynamic elements
3. They compiled all of the franchisee data (logos, names, and websites) into a Google Sheet that triggered the rendering  
4. Plainly received the data and rendered hundreds of videos for them
5. They also set up a Plainly > Google Drive integration, which sent the videos to Google Drive for them to review and distribute to their franchisees

The Results

In the end, Anywhere was thrilled with the results and the little time it took to complete. Since deployment, this campaign has garnered more than 1,100+ downloads of the customized content.

With the help of Plainly, Anywhere was able to export hundreds of videos in a matter of minutes. 

Also, thanks to this project, Anywhere now has a scalable setup that can be used when they have a similar campaign. This is exactly why Plainly was created: to help people skip the manual, boring parts and focus on the bigger, more creative parts of any project. 

Want to speed up your workflow and jumpstart your creativity? Book a demo with us today to see how you can get your project done with Plainly.