Real Estate Website Trulia Targets Women in Largest Ad Campaign Ever

Real estate website Trulia really, really wants you to download its app. The company is spending $45 million in its first national ad campaign to convince home-buyers, particularly women, to use the company’s mobile products.

The campaign, centered around the slogan “Moment of Trulia,” casts Trulia as a service that can help people search real estate listings on the go. The first in a series of TV spots shows a couple using Trulia’s app to search housing listings in the gym, on the drive home and even in the shower. Trulia says the campaign is targeted primarily at women between the ages of 25 and 44. “Most of the advertising in the category sells the dream of finding the perfect home, but life isn’t like that. The process can be daunting and you often have to make trade offs,” Kira Wampler, Trulia’s chief marketing officer, said in a company press release. “We wanted to take an authentic, real approach to the category and show consumers specifically, how our mobile products solve their real life problems during the home search.”

The campaign will include TV and radio commercials, outdoor ads and online marketing. At $45 million, the campaign dwarfs all of the company’s past efforts—Trulia spent less than $8 million on all advertising in 2013. The sum is more than one-quarter of the $145 million in revenue Trulia generated in all of 2013. The huge spend is part of the company’s broader effort to get more people browsing on mobile, where Trulia says people are more likely to contact real estate professionals about specific houses than they are on a desktop computer.

The big outlay is also an effort to keep up with Zillow, a competing real estate listings site that launched its first national ad campaign last summer. Zillow had about 15 million more monthly unique visitors to its sites and mobile apps in 2013 than Trulia and generated $50 million more in revenue.