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In its latest marketing campaign, Tinder riffs on some classic romantic comedy tropes straight out of a 1990s Jennifer Lopez flick, with adorkable, clumsy characters, chance encounters on busy city streets and rain-soaked embraces.
The message is that meet cutes happen on Tinder all the time, although maybe not exactly the way they do in Hollywood movies.
The nostalgia-steeped effort, delivered with a wink by agency of record Mischief @ No Fixed Address, would have been unthinkable before last year, when Tinder was largely considered a place for one-night stands and nothing more. The coveted demographic of young women, in fact, had derisively likened it to “a sleazy bar.”
The difference between then and now? “It Starts With a Swipe,” an Effie Award-winning campaign that dropped in February 2023 and changed the trajectory of the legacy dating application, spiking its third-quarter-2023 revenue by 11% year over year to $509 million.
As the brand’s first global work, the ads didn’t shy away from the app’s ingrained bad rep. And while that may seem counterintuitive, the goal was to show that initial human connections via Tinder, no matter how impulsive or visceral, can lead to something more meaningful.
“The real unlock on Tinder was not trying to change the perception that Tinder is a hookup app, but instead changing the perception of what a hookup can be,” Jeff McCrory, chief strategy officer and partner at Mischief, told ADWEEK. “We wanted the world we were creating for Tinder to be hopeful—young singles want to meet people, explore and see where it takes them.”
Heavy competition, high stakes
The stakes were high, with Tinder having just posted four straight quarters of declining revenue while feeling the heat from well-funded, aggressive competitors in the space like Hinge, Bumble and OkCupid.
As a prime mover in dating apps, having debuted in 2012, Tinder had carved out a high-profile place in popular culture but didn’t have a well-defined brand platform to speak to existing, lapsed or potential users, according to Stephanie Danzi, its senior vice president of global marketing.