Excelent dating app

This week a lot of people will be spending their time swiping left and right on dating apps to find someone to share Valentine’s Day with.

Sometimes, the sheer amount of choice on those apps can be overwhelming. It’s a little bit like primary season, where it can feel like a new person or policy is introduced in the race every day. And just like dating, it’s a crowded field, but the apps could be your best chance at getting the attention of someone you might not get in your everyday life.

That’s why dating apps in particular can be an excellent place to advertise your 2020 candidate, platform, or advocacy campaign.

There’s plenty of evidence that advertising on dating apps works. On Valentine’s Day in 2014, Dominos pizza paired up with Tinder to create a sponsored profile where users who swiped right were matched with the brand, then invited to start a conversation and win some free goods.

They didn’t stop there. They took the “cheesiest” and “sauciest” messages from those conversations and shared them on their social media pages, effectively expanding their audience for the ad campaign across several platforms.

Advocacy organizations like Amnesty International and the Body Shop ran their own campaigns on Tinder, too, getting people to sign on to petitions or learn more about their issue.

The key to getting this right is to make your ad stand out, just as you would if you were creating a dating profile for your campaign. You want to tell people who you are, why they should care about you, and use the specific platform to your advantage. That means doing some research on the demographics of each of the dating app’s users, just as you would before you put out mailers in any given district.

For example, it’s important to know that Bumble is designed for women who want to take the lead on making the first move. (As a side note, the company is picky about who it decides to let advertise on its platform, potentially offering progressive campaigns a particular advantage on an app adding nearly 1 million users a week).

Meanwhile, you’ll want to consider that Grindr is the leading dating app servicing the gay community.

And in general, dating apps are very popular among 18 to 24 year-olds, encompassing both a key voter demographic and the largest consumer group.

Using this kind of demographic research, a company like Crunch Fitness found that Grindr was the best place for their cheekier brand, while Starbucks found Match a good platform for their 2015 Valentine’s Day ad.

Perhaps the best part about advertising with dating apps is that it’s a relatively new platform for companies, and an even more rarely-used platform for political campaigns. You already win just by being where no other competitors are, and yet, for a national campaign, there live tens of millions of potential voters.

The fact is that people on dating apps are already primed to try and make a connection -- so why not find a creative way to get them to connect with your campaign? You never know, they could fall in love.

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Domenica Ghanem

Content Manager, Three(i) Creative Communications

#nonprofit#advocacyorganizations#app#advertising#2020elections