21% ad recall lift in student housing – Core Spaces and Adlook build awareness early
The Client
Core Spaces is a vertically integrated real estate investment, development, and property management firm headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. Founded in 2010, the company specializes in student housing, build-to-rent single-family communities, and urban residential and hospitality developments.
Core Spaces owns and operates student housing beds across university markets nationwide, with a growing development pipeline, and is known for progressive design, strong amenity programs, and a community-first approach to resident experience.
The challenge
Lease-up for Fall 2027 is decided long before anyone signs. Core Spaces needed students and parents to know the brand ahead of that decision window, across seven university markets and their surrounding feeder markets, all within the same campaign.
Awareness was the goal, but the brief reached well beyond it, because Core Spaces’ corporate team needed the same campaign to show a traceable line from media exposure through to on-site engagement and leasing intent, so that the awareness investment could be defended in the terms the business already reports in.
That is why Core Spaces went looking for a partner that could:
- Build reach efficiently across connected TV (CTV), guided by a benchmark of 3x maximum weekly frequency
- Make the creative work twice over – telling the Core Spaces lifestyle story and giving students and parents a direct route to the site from the ad itself.
- Drive site visitation on display prospecting lines, against a click-through rate benchmark of 0.16%.
- Show the corporate team what the awareness play was doing downstream, by running a second display line against on-site engagement and lower-funnel activity rather than upper-funnel delivery alone, re-engaging users who had already visited the site.
- Track a defined set of on-site actions across the funnel, from first research to leasing intent
The strategy
We ran CTV and desktop and mobile display against two audiences built from interest and behavior signals: “Next Chapter Viewers” (students) and “Living Room Decision Makers” (parents), across Tampa, Bloomington, West Lafayette, Ann Arbor, Clemson, Knoxville, and Madison, plus their surrounding feeder markets.
The creative was built to do more than deliver a brand impression. CTV ran with an interactive overlay and a QR code routing viewers from the TV screen to the site, and rich media display used cube and parallax formats to carry the Core Spaces lifestyle story in the unit itself.
- CTV carried reach and frequency against the awareness goal.
- Display prospecting ran on content-based targeting, with audiences built in Adlook’s Audience Builder, optimized to click-through rate and site visitation.
- A second display line re-engaged users who had already reached the site, optimized to on-site engagement and lower-funnel activity rather than to upper-funnel delivery alone.
- Business measurement ran in parallel: cost per action across homepage views, form fills, floor plan page views, contact page views, and apply-now clicks, spanning both broad site interest and bottom-of-funnel leasing intent.
- Adlook’s Brand Lift Study measured aided ad recall among the student and parent audiences, giving a brand read alongside the on-site metrics.
The results
Every benchmark in the brief was cleared. Across the seven university markets and their feeder markets, the campaign delivered:
- 5.2M reach, at 3.7x total frequency across the full channel mix
- 2.2x CTV frequency, held comfortably under the 3x cap set for the awareness line
- 0.33% click-through rate on display prospecting, more than double the 0.16% goal
- 45% improvement to CPA on display
- 55% conversion lift overall, including a 47% lift among users who converted within an hour of exposure
- 21% Aided Ad Recall lift, verified by Adlook’s Brand Lift Study among the student and parent audiences
Reach and frequency held to plan. Response beat the goal, and the brand read moved – the traceable line from exposure to leasing intent Core Spaces needed to defend the investment.
Through the Client’s eyes
Lease-up is decided months before anyone signs a lease. We wanted a campaign that reached students and parents early and still showed up in our on-site numbers. Adlook took that brief seriously and planned against it, which is not something we have always been able to say about an awareness buy.”
Looking ahead
Lease-up is not won in a single flight – it is built through sustained presence in the months when students and parents are still deciding where to look. The Fall/Winter program with Core Spaces showed how upper-funnel reach and on-site measurement reinforce each other when both are planned from the same brief, with a 21% aided ad recall lift alongside a $275 cost per leasing action.
The natural next chapter for Core Spaces and Adlook is to turn this into a repeatable lease-up playbook – refining the student and parent audience models with each cycle, building on the attention and engagement read, and extending the same approach across the wider development pipeline.
Through Adlook’s eyes
Most awareness campaigns end at a reach number. Core Spaces asked what it moved on the site, so we built the measurement around floor plan views and apply-now clicks from the start, and reported in those terms.”
