JiWire: ‘Massive Increase’ in Hyperlocal Ad Interest From National Brands

JiWire, a mobile audience company that uses WiFi loading pages to connect advertisers with consumers, has released its Q2 “Mobile Audience Insights Report” this morning. The study, which monitors consumer usage of location-enabled mobile devices across the company’s network of 30,000 locations, takes a deep dive into the ways in which specific segments of consumers are leveraging location – both in terms of utility and tagging content.

Dee Dee Paeseler, director of marketing at JiWire, says there has been a  “massive increase” in interest from national brands in hyperlocal advertising. “Brands know they want it, they’re just trying to figure out how to use it,” Paeseler told Street Fight in an interview.

She said that the big takeaway from the survey is that, as far as location-based applications are concerned, men and women are quite different: “We found that women tend to focus more on personal care, and personal health, whereas men are more do-it-yourself, and maintenance related users.” In an interesting note, the study also found that gender, and particularly parenthood, played a role in predicting usage patterns across other important mobile and hyperlocal segments. According to the study, 52% of moms own tablets compared to 44% of fathers and 40% of women without children.

The parent set also appears to be more active when it comes to geo-tagging content – 64% of parents said they location tag posts on sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram compared to 58% of those without children. More importantly however, location-tagging is quickly becoming ubiquitous among younger demographics with three out of four consumers under 35 tagging content on a regular basis.

“It shows the comfort people have with sharing their location,” Paeseler said. “People do it habitually – nearly a quarter of those who location-tag told us that they didn’t know why they did it.”

The pervasiveness of location tagging on Facebook and Twitter – 88% and 68% of app users respectively – points to the massive and still-untapped hyperlocal opportunities for advertisers on these social networks. LocalResponse has already seen success building direct response tools for brands to engage consumers around geo-tagged tweets and posts. And while Foursquare‘s user base is impressive, Twitter and Facebook provide the scale needed to entice national brands to begin building campaigns around location.

Steven Jacobs is deputy editor at Street Fight.