Homewood is using a graphic novel format in a new series of ads aimed at attracting young homebuyers who might otherwise stay in the city, where brunch options are abundant, but parking is painful.
Called “Think Homewood,” the campaign launched this week with panel ads on the CTA’s blue line. That line runs through neighborhoods that have in the past two decades become ground zero for the young, educated and evidently graphic novel-reading set.
The biggest draw that Homewood touted in the ads? Home prices. Crain’s cites data that puts the median home price in the village at $131,000, while in West Town — which the blue line cuts right through — it’s just over $1 million.
The ads emphasize everything from the joys of riding bicycles for getting around to dropping by a farmer’s market to chomping on avocado toast.
“Some of the situations (in the comics) are ripped from my own life,” Mary Jane Maharry, the interim marketing director for Homewood, told Crain’s. She and her husband moved to the village, about 10 miles outside the city limits at the southern end of Cook County, in 2009.
The myriad inconveniences of city life are highlighted in campy dialogue that walks a line between making the city look like a hard place to live, and acknowledging the many pleasures it contains for the young and the affluent.
The village of about about 20,000 residents hired a local artist to draw the panels, and budgeted about $20,000 for the effort, according to Crain’s.
Other suburbs, including tony Lake Forest and the bungalow belt town of Berwyn, have run ad campaigns in the city targeting a similar demographic. –Scott Klocksin