The new horror film “Presence” is indulging in a guerrilla marketing stunt with a fake billboard in New York City highlighting actress Julia Fox’s role as a realtor.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the billboard is outside a lower Manhattan vape shop and shows Fox as her film character of “Cece” from Specter Realty. The billboard also features a website and a phone number (908-905-CECE) where New Jersey-focused house hunters could contact her.
The film’s distributor, Neon, said the phone number connects to a voicemail that has already received more than 1,500 messages, with most of them aware of the film and leaving jokey messages that are “in character” with Cece’s function in the film as the realtor who sells a haunted house to an unsuspecting family.
However, some genuine realtors didn’t get the joke and genuinely believed Fox was looking at an exit from acting and a career switch to real estate. One Los Angeles realtor went so far as to leave her contact data and offer to help the career switch “if you’re really in real estate, Julia … the market is always good for agents, no matter what time of year.”
Photo courtesy of Neon
“Realtor” is a trademarked designation and is always capitalized when using it. It is NOT a generic name for those in real estate brokerage. Unless one is a member of the National Association of Realtors (NAR) one may not use the designation “Realtor” in the operation of their business. You may call your self a real estate agent or broker, as appropriate depending on the license you hold, or a realty agent but NOT a “Realtor” unless you are a member of NAR. Your article doe not capitalize Realtor, so it is using that designation incorrectly.
As previously stated, we do not capitalize full words – only acronyms are entirely capitalized. We are aware of how NAR prefers to use the word in question, but that is not in keeping with our editorial style. Thank you.