Getting Out of the Brand Book: Tinder and Brand.AI on Evolving With Culture
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.
Finding the right role for new tech
Working with Brand.AI, Tinder can run its existing brand assets through the platform’s model to build out a wider universe for marketing teams to use for idea generation.
“There are things that AI is great at and there are things that it is not,” Kantor said.
AI, for instance, can’t build a brand on its own—only humans can do that—but it can help suggest different directions and assess risk.
Kantor, who used to lead marketing at Meta, wanted to create something with Brand.AI that would help teams like hers understand their brand as an engine or data set.
“Not as a book, but brand as something living that serves as a GitHub for the brand owners to continually update,” she explained. “AI can help you keep fresh, can power tools for social teams and everyone to be able to tap into.”
https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/tinder-brand-ai/