Ben and Skin show, Celina Record

`Ben and Skin Show’ co-host Rogers, family chronicle move to Celina Lisa Ferguson, lferguson@starlocalmedia.com Feb 19, 2016 Ben Rogers and his family have yet to move into their new home in Celina’s Light Farms community. Still, he can’t stop raving about the place. That’s to be expected, in part because the co-host of “The Ben & Skin Show” on 105.3 FM The Fan is contractually obligated to do so as part of an advertising agreement the station signed with Republic Property Group, which developed Light Farms. However, Rogers insists that even before he was being paid to talk up the sprawling master-planned community, he was telling nearly anyone who listened off the air about it anyway. “It became like a point of pride. I was an ambassador for this. I was talking about it everywhere,” he said last week while standing in the living room of the home, which is still under construction. He, his wife Kat and their three children are scheduled to move in later this month. “I truly believe in this place. I love it,” Rogers said. He recalled talking with his longtime sports radio show co-host Jeff “Skin” Wade about Light Farms: “We’d be in a commercial break and I’m telling Skin, ‘Dude, you’ve got to move to Light Farms because of this and this and this.’” In fact, it was Rogers’ high praise of the place that he said prompted him to reach out to the developer last year about advertising with the radio station. That was shortly after he and Kat signed a contract to purchase the 4,000-square-foot, five-bedroom home. The company bought some radio advertising spots and, soon after, a social media-heavy ad campaign featuring the Rogers family took shape. Last July, he began chronicling the family’s home-building process on Twitter via the handle Ben Rogers in LF (@lightfarms). The tweets have mostly featured photos and short videos of the family getting to know their new neighborhood and checking out events and establishments in nearby Prosper, where they have lived since selling their former home in Dallas’ Prestonwood area last summer. In recent months, the family and Wade have starred in “The Rogers Family Moves to Light Farms,” a series of short, comedic YouTube videos featured on a Light Farms-sponsored channel. In one of the clips, Rogers and Wade riff about the popularity of privately owned golf carts in the community. In another, Wade shouts from the home’s upstairs window at Rogers and his kids playing football in the construction debris-laden street below. The videos “have been very well received and people are enjoying them,” Rogers said. “It’s been fun to watch this idea evolve, but ultimately what it’s all about is just trying to let people know that [Light Farms] is out here and it’s awesome.” Travis Selcer, marketing director for Republic Property Group, said the company was “presented with a really unique opportunity when we found out that Ben was moving into the community.” He said company executives “thought it would be a lot of fun to see the whole process through a buyer’s eyes, through a homeowner’s eyes, versus through the eyes of a developer. We could reach people in a different way that was maybe a little bit more authentic.” The company was hands-off, Rogers said, when it came to deciding on what content to include in the tweets and videos. “A lot of times an advertiser will hand you copy points and say, ‘Here’s 10 things I need you to talk about,’” he explained. In this situation, “They were like, ‘Use your words. If you like it, talk about it, say what you like about it.’ So that’s been really neat.” “We gave him free reign,” Selcer said of Rogers, “and we’ve been extremely happy and entertained by the whole process.” Describing himself as a “branding nerd,” Rogers said starring in ads for his own neighborhood is no different than promoting any of the products he does during his radio show. “What I do for a living is I tell people about things that I like and developing relationships with listeners,” he explained. “If you tell people you use this product and you don’t really use it … you lose credibility.” The Light Farms ad campaign “is the most personal endorsement that we’ve ever embarked on,” Rogers said. “We were going to move here regardless … so it ended up being a natural fit as opposed to [the developer] putting up a billboard or hiring an actor to come talk about why their neighborhood is great.” An added benefit of the campaign, Kat said, is being able to document the home-construction experience for the family. “I think it’s neat just for our own personal thing to have,” she said. “When the kids are grown, we can look back at the videos and go, ‘Oh, remember that when we first bought the house?’” A frequent guest on the radio show, Kat said she has grown accustomed to sharing much of the family’s personal life with the public. “It’s just a natural thing.” Rogers explained, “What we do as personalities on the air, you welcome in your listeners as family. … I just love the air of authenticity about that to where you’re just sharing. The walls come down and you’re able to connect with people on a different level.” In this case, however, walls went up around the Rogers family. Viewers of the videos have been able to watch as the abode evolved from a dirt lot to a spacious semi-custom home complete with an oversized laundry room/office (the “mom office” or “moffice,” as the family calls it) and a half-court Nerf basketball space upstairs. In the backyard, Rogers said plans are to eventually install a Whiffle Ball field and an outdoor kitchen. Once the moving boxes are unpacked, Selcer said he’d like to see the ad campaign continue in another direction with the Rogers family. “Up until now, it’s been from foundation to finish line … on the whole build process,” he said, explaining that a shift to follow the day-to-day lives of the family in Light Farms may be forthcoming. “To me, that’s the next chapter of the story.” Rogers agreed: “There are a lot of things we love about this (community), features and benefits that I’m happy to share … so I think there’s plenty of content to go.”