Effie Case Study: How Tinder’s Turnaround Started ‘With a Swipe’

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.

“It was absolutely time for us to take control of our brand narrative,” Danzi told ADWEEK. “In a sense, we reintroduced Tinder to the world to prove why we matter to a new generation of singles.”

While the category had become jam-packed with looking-for-love options since Tinder’s groundbreaking entry onto the scene, dating app fatigue had also set in more recently, especially with Generation Z. 

Women in that age group had left Tinder for other apps or ditched the scene entirely. After a decade of almost consistent double-digit revenue growth, Tinder saw a decline in the first quarter of 2022, followed by a second, third and fourth.

Against that backdrop, Tinder couldn’t afford a fumble, with Danzi saying, “It’s impossible to overstate how important this was,” although Tinder’s widespread brand recognition acted as a bit of a double-edged sword.

“Because of our prominence in the space, and culture as a whole, Tinder is a bit of a lightning rod for social commentary,” Danzi said. “We’ve seen how recent brand missteps can be amplified across channels like wildfire.”

Rom-com but make it punk

After extensive brainstorming and refining, the creative team infused its approach with “a touch of whimsy,” McCrory said, “but not overly saccharine and sweet—like a rom-com/punk rock mashup. Who wouldn’t want to live in a world like that?”

The resulting campaign featured an all-inclusive cast of Gen Z daters representing the app’s core membership and the various relationship categories they fell under. They aimed to give a modern take on dating gone right, showing that users could define relationships in their own ways.

Color-saturated ads were inspired by the throwback look and feel of romance novels, complete with swirly font treatments and clever copy that heralded relationship milestones like leaving a toothbrush at a crush’s house.

One eye-catching 15-second video centered on a couple pawing each other on a nightclub dance floor but later going on a furniture shopping excursion together. The tagline: “Some Tinder dates turn into one-night stands. But some turn into two nightstands.”

Media buys were as strategic as the creative message, with Tinder blanketing social and digital channels, for obvious reasons, while also hitting streaming platforms such as Hulu, Roku and YouTube.

“It Starts With a Swipe” dropped initially in the U.S. and Europe before expanding to South America, Asia and Australia, representing more marketing firepower than the brand had ever used before. Its out-of-home ads in well-trafficked locations made a splash in major cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Paris, London and Madrid.

Stellar outcome

Results of “It Starts With a Swipe” went far beyond expectations. Tinder’s “first choice” score rose from 22% to 36% in two months, which is 280% over the brand’s stated objective. Post-campaign, more women under 30 said they felt that Tinder was a place for “any type of relationship,” rising from 31% to 48%, 340% over objective.

Brand consideration increased by 16 points, with a 15% bump in young female consumers who said, “Tinder is a brand for people like me.”

Parent company Match Group credited the campaign with boosting user sign-ups, particularly among women and young demos, returning the brand to positive growth and overtaking competitors in brand preference.

“It Starts With a Swipe” will continue as an umbrella campaign for the foreseeable future, per the brand, with the team adding new facets and executions. 

The latest incarnation, for example, uses celebrities for the first time, with actors Lana Condor from Netflix’s To All the Boys franchise and Evan Mock from HBO’s 2021 Gossip Girl remake. Expect another push for the traditionally busy back-to-school season.

Tinder has “just warmed up our marketing muscle,” Danzi said. “We’re looking to step into culture in ways that make sense for the brand but also get people talking.”