The IAB confirmed it: hyperlocal is the future of marketing

A few years ago, we decided to focus our efforts on 'hyperlocal' marketing. In part because I could see that it was going to get harder and harder to track and trust the information we would be fed by platforms as meaningful interests and insights on consumers.

Plus, we’d worked with restaurants for years, always with a focus on local marketing. And we’ve also been working with care homes in recent years, whose service users were local, but often purchased by individuals who live elsewhere.

It made for an interesting project, and helped us hone in on hyperlocal as a key offering.

So we were super excited to hear that the UK’s IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) view 'Localism' (we say 'hyperlocal') as where they predict brands will be investing their energies by the time 2030 comes around.

Local identity is becoming the dominant force shaping how people engage with content, brands, and advertising. It’s one thing that evokes trust, and amidst a growing trust crisis, an approach which delivers true authenticity is going to make a real difference.

So, without further ado, here's a summary of the webinar (but if you're short on time and you'd like to see how we can help you to reach more local audiences, get in touch).

Research shared at the event, spanning consumer behaviour data from Ipsos Iris (10,000-person panel, passively tracked across 25,000 devices), a 5,000-person trust study from Reach, a Gen Z deep-dive from LADbible, and community identity research from MG OMD, all pointed to the same conclusion.

Local identity isn't a niche. It's how people ground themselves.

MG OMD's Belonging in Britain study found that "where I grew up" ranks as the fourth most important identity trait for people in the UK today, above profession, above national identity, above almost everything except close relationships and personal values.

LADbible's Gen Z research (6,500 respondents, the largest study of its kind in this age bracket) found that older Gen Z are actually choosing to stay close to home, not just for cost-of-living reasons, but because local community genuinely matters to them.

The upshot for brands: the community you're speaking into is as important as the message you're sending. And the brands who win by 2030 will be the ones who figured that out now.

One of the most striking findings from Reach's research: 96% of people trust what they're exposed to within their communities.

Meanwhile, national advertising trust is declining. AI-generated content is eroding authenticity signals. Audiences are getting better at tuning out anything that feels generic, distant, or produced-for-everyone.

This is exactly why hyperlocal marketing isn't just a nice-to-have channel strategy. It's a trust strategy.

When your brand shows up in a way that's recognisably of a place, using local language, local references, local creators, local context, you're borrowing credibility from the community itself. That's a fundamentally different relationship to an audience than running a national campaign and hoping it lands everywhere.

Here's something worth noting: the IAB research compared like-for-like, generic creative placed in local media environments, versus the same creative in national environments. Even then, ads in local contexts showed significantly higher recall, engagement, purchase intent, and recommendation rates.

That's the floor. That's the baseline.

We'd argue the ceiling is much higher. Because localised creative, copy that references the neighbourhood, video shot in the city, talent that speaks with the right accent, imagery that looks like here, amplifies those trust signals even further.

LADbible put it well: audiences don't just want to see themselves in content. They want to hear themselves. That means the presenter, the script, the humour, the cultural references. When all of that clicks into place, you're not running an ad, you're part of the community's conversation.

We localise creative across YouTube, paid social, and display as standard. Not as a premium add-on. Because the data, and frankly, our results, consistently show it converts better.

One of the more nuanced points from the event came from MG OMD's community research: you can't just broadcast into a community and expect belonging to happen. The trust that communities hold is personal, peer-to-peer, earned. It's not media-buyable in the traditional sense.

The smart play is to work with the people and organisations that already have that trust. Local creators. Community events. Regional brands with deep roots in a place. These partnerships aren't just feel-good, they're the mechanism by which national or multi-site brands can actually participate in local culture rather than just advertise at it.

MG OMD partnered with Virgin Media and Word on the Curb: they centred a creator who was already embedded in a community, let her tell the story through her own lens, and let the product follow the person. That's not an influencer play. That's community strategy.

If you're a hospitality brand, a QSR, a retail chain, or any business with physical locations across the UK, this should be the framework you're working from.

What excites us about all of this is that it validates something we've been building for years: hyperlocal marketing as a scalable, data-driven system, not a one-off creative experiment.

Here's what that looks like in practice:

Hyperlocal targeting across search and social. We use geography, behaviour, and intent signals to build audience segments that reflect where people actually are and what they're actually looking for, not broad demographic buckets.

Localised creative and copy at scale. Different creative for different cities, catchment areas, and contexts. We produce this across paid social and YouTube, meaning a campaign for a restaurant group doesn't run the same asset in Brighton as it does in Manchester.

Real-world signal automation. We've built automations that respond to live signals, weather, local events, time of day, so that creative relevance isn't just geographic, it's situational. A rainy Tuesday in Glasgow calls for different messaging than a sunny Friday in Bristol. (It calls for more layers, obviously.)

GEO and AEO optimisation. As AI search continues to reshape how people discover local businesses, we're helping brands show up in the right AI-generated answers, not just the right rankings. Discoverability and recommendability are becoming the same thing.

The IAB framed 2030 as the horizon for hyperlocal to become mainstream marketing strategy. We'd gently push back: 2030 is when everyone will be doing it, which means the competitive advantage will have narrowed considerably.

The brands that benefit most from hyperlocal will be the ones who build the infrastructure, the creative systems, and the community relationships now, while it's still a differentiator rather than a baseline expectation.

That's what we do. And we've been doing it for hospitality brands, private medical clinics, entertainment venues, and QSRs who needed to reach the right people in the right places, and convert them.

If you want to understand what a hyperlocal strategy looks like for your business specifically, let's talk.