With those words from legendary storyteller Julian Fellowes (Downton Abbey, The Gilded Age) ringing in our ears, we set out to help drive interest in the Newport Mansions for the Preservation Society of Newport County.

It’s no secret that our society is completely transfixed by wealth and the lifestyles of those fortunate enough to be in possession of it. Our fixation on the royal family and the undying popularity of television hits like White Lotus, Bridgerton, and Succession underscore the cultural obsession with wealth.

And if you’ve ever been to any of the Newport Mansions, you know the one thing they communicate unambiguously is ostentatious wealth.

So the challenge became, “How do we breathe life into these inanimate shrines to wealth?”

OUR STRATEGY

Don’t sell it like a house. Sell it like a movie. We determined that the best way to breathe life into them was to literally put life into them. So we put the spotlight on the deliciously dramatic lives of the wealthy families who lived in them. And with that, the ‘Live the Drama’ campaign was born.

The campaign dramatizes the people and stories behind these lavish properties in the style of a Hollywood blockbuster. For The Breakers, the grandest of the Newport Mansions, that meant introducing the inimitable Vanderbilts through a trailer, billboards, landing page, etc.—all the trappings of movie marketing.