Millennial-made dating app Tinder is on a mission to win over Gen Z—and it’s employing AI to help with the task.
That means identifying the brand’s “core truths” while acknowledging some harder truths, said Stephanie Danzi, senior vice president of global marketing at Tinder.
“We’ve been on a bit of a journey to reclaim our narrative,” Danzi said at ADWEEK’s Brandweek in Phoenix, Ariz. “We’re not saying Tinder is not something that people use for more casual dating, but what we are saying is it has a bunch of possibilities.”
Danzi joined Chelsey Susin Kantor, founder of Brand.AI, an AI-powered platform and sponsor of the session, to talk about how AI supports its efforts to evolve with the culture.
Funding experimentation
For Tinder, the marketing budget is split into three categories, Danzi explained: First, the bulk of the spend (around 70%) goes to tried-and-tested channels that reliably work for the brand’s audience.
Second, around 20% of those dollars go toward relatively safe experiments—trying out strategies that aren’t actually new but might be new for Tinder. For example, Danzi pointed to a recent foray into brand collaborations with Elf Cosmetics.
The last 10% of spend goes toward completely “moonshot” ideas, often playing with new and emerging technologies like AI.
“Try to set aside small amounts of experimentation money so that you can figure out what’s going to end up falling into that tried-and-true bucket for you,” Danzi said.