FROM Debilitating chore TO Valuing an incidental personal upskill

Homeownership is a major life accomplishment. But for many low- to moderate-income people, misperceptions and intimidation make the homebuying process too overwhelming to even consider. To help Fannie Mae empower more people to achieve the homeownership dream, we made the uncomfortable comfortable—and fun—to get our audience to harness the excitement of homeownership.

“Your Own Story” was an intentional educational campaign that helped dispel commonly held beliefs about the homebuying process. Grounded in research and insights, key messaging addressed common misperceptions, such as down payment and credit score myths, and put the future homebuyer at ease by encouraging them to start with one fact at a time.

Beautiful illustration and animated narratives helped our audience feel seen and connected them to the realities of our storytellers—their challenges, and their drive to succeed—while creating a simple, imaginative, and hopeful world that allowed them to dream of their own homeownership journey.

This campaign’s primary business goal was to educate and engage a consumer audience. Thus, when calculating for ROI, we determined that the performance must be based on standard engagement metrics, not a monetary business metric. With this in mind, we saw excellent ROI across all tactics and performance metrics.

• The campaign drove high levels of engagement and exceeded all forecasted KPIs: impressions, clicks and CTR.

• Click volume (2,017,179) was exceeded by 42% (1.4MM forecast) and CTR by 13% (0.34% forecast).

• Total impression volume (529,216,658) exceeded forecast by 26% (-419.9MM forecast).

• Campaign averaged ~37.8MM impressions a month and a CTR of 0.38%. Ended 2021 having accounted for 8.2MM Unique D&I impressions at a 4x or greater frequency.

• We saw 23,575 conversions in total, led in part by video content engagement across all three themes: Credit Score, Down Payment, and “Where do I start?”

• Undertone interactive quiz drove very strong engagement with 38,343 quiz questions answered during the campaign. This reflects a highly engaged audience and proves the effectiveness of this type of creative and ad unit.

• Paid search drove the most conversions and the longest landing page sessions at 76 seconds, reflecting that our audience was engaged and learning more about the homebuying process.