"The idea was to sell the ideal house to vieweers, and to tell the audience that [Hilton and Richie] were going to be going into people's homes this season," says E! director of marketing and advertising Annemarie Batur. "We have a mix of national and local media, so we look at this as a complement to our media plan... and it also got picked up nationally, with both industry and consumer media exposure."

She says the event helped boost consumer interest, partly out of its sheer novelty.

“It’s never been done, though it’s been discussed in the alternative media world,” says Patrick West, general manager of New York's Zoom Media, the alternative media firm that created the promotion. “It’s like a giant, living, breathing billboard, but it’s taken on a life of its own.”

West says Zoom had only three weeks to put together the promotion, and he says he'd want more time if he had to do it over. It turned out to be a tricky proposition.

The most difficult part was recruiting homeowners. Zoom had to find a high-traffic neighborhood in a large enough market, Atlanta, as it turned out, where both zoning rules and tolerant, liberal-minded neighbors would make a one-month promotion possible.