With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, it is difficult for people to ignore the bombardment of dating web site ads that pop up on computer screens or stare them in the face during the daily commute, all asking if you are ready to find love. Once an embarrassing secret for the digital sect, in recent years online dating has become mainstream, just another platform for many to meet their potential partner. The latest Kantar Media TGI data profiles this group of online daters and allows us to discover far more about who they are and how they can best be targeted.
In Great Britain there are currently over 1.5 million adults who spend time engaged in online dating. The age group within which they are especially focussed is 25-29 (they are well over twice as likely as the average adult to be in this age range) 18-24 year olds are the second largest group of online daters; nearly 16% of this age group use online dating. While Generation X may be using the medium hoping to get married, Generation Y may use online dating simply to get to know and meet people as they begin to explore the dating scene.
According to TGI’s lifestage segmentation, those who are classified as non-standard families (Not married or living as a couple, live with relations, do not live with son or daughter and do not live with parents if 15-34) are more than twice as likely as the average adult to use online dating. Since this group is more than twice as likely as the average adult to have separated or divorced their long term partner in the past year, this is an audience ripe for marketers to target as they search for a new love interest, but this time around online.
Digging deeper into their attitudes, online daters are very concerned with their looks as they seek to maximise their chances with the opposite sex. They are more than twice as likely as the average adult to like to stand out in a crowd and 76% more likely to believe that a designer label improves a person’s image. This group are not afraid to take their obsession with appearance to the extreme; they are nearly twice as likely as the average to consider having cosmetic surgery.
Looking at the latest TGI Clickstream data, combining metered online behaviour with the full range of offline insights on TGI, mobile is making a huge impact in online dating traffic. Out of the estimated 1.5 million adults in Britain who use online dating sites, 825,000 accessed these sites on a mobile device ‘in the past month’.
Despite the various media online dating sites already exploit to reach current and potential online daters, TGI shows that marketers are particularly likely to find their target audience at the cinema, perhaps already on a date! This group is particularly likely to be amongst the heaviest 20% of consumers of cinema (nearly twice as likely as the average). This group is more than three times more likely than the average cinema goer to visit the cinema once a week or more. They are also 52% more likely than the average cinema goer to pay the most attention to cinema adverts.
Source: Kantar Media