Tinder offers brands a date with the world’s millennials – but no posing, please.
Sean Rad invented Tinder after sitting in a bar and trying to catch the eye of a woman he wanted to date.
“After the hundredth time of looking at this girl, she eventually looked at me and smiled, which was interesting because it gave me courage to go and walk up to her,” he told Cosmopolitan editor Farrah Storr in “A Cosmopolitan Conversation with Sean Rad” Wednesday afternoon on the ITV Stage at Advertising Week Europe. “I still got rejected, but it brought this realisation that a lot of connections don’t happen because we are afraid of rejection or we can’t form that introduction. If we could solve that and remove the friction, we could make a massive change.”
He went away and started work on the Tinder smartphone app with some friends. And 23 days later, the “Swipe right to date” app was born.
Some 11 billion matches have been made on Tinder since it launched in 2012 and countless relationships have formed through the revolutionary app which is changing the way humanity mates.
Rad sees Tinder as something really new in the social media space. “What is amazing about Tinder is unlike any other platform – it leads to something in the real world. A lot of social platforms just want to keep you on there.” He revealed that Tinder uses Australia as a test-bed for new ideas as its population are early adopters. And he said that Tinder axed a service called “Matchmaker” which allowed people to hook up their friends on the app. It was popular with a small group of users, but did not appeal widely. “Our internal policy is if the majority of our user-base doesn’t get value out of something, then we didn’t do it right. It is important as a brand to be honest with your audience, if you do something wrong it is OK, take it back and try again.”
Storr grilled him for insights into the mating game and to reveal what he has learned from the reams of data that Tinder offers about our behaviour. He confirmed that women are way more selective than men and are much less likely to swipe right. But he stressed the huge importance of first impressions. Human minds have evolved to glean huge amounts of information about people from how they look and the impressions they leave. Photos and first impressions are “incredibly profound. Human minds are so powerful in what we understand, that you are processing this subconscious data.”
He said Tinder is still developing and is in its early days. It needs a highly complex algorithm to create matches because human connections are a two way street, which is a “difficult problem to solve from a data science point of view.”
“We look at the aggregate of all the data. We are still exploring the possibilities of what we can do with that data. Every time you swipe we will try to understand why you said yes and why you said no and we’ll use that to give you better matches and on a global ecosystem scale, try to make better predictions about what the general population is looking for,” he explained.
Storr was eager to find out what types of photos work best on Tinder. Rad said that headshots and group photos get lower response rates as do posed or modelled shots. The most successful shots were those showing people in the context of their interests – action shots such as skiing. For Storr, a shot of her sitting on the Advertising Week stage would work well, he said.
Rad – still just 29 but professing to feel old compared to the many 16-24 year olds who use Tinder – says the app is a brilliant platform for brand advertising.
“We love advertising, though it is newer for us. What is great is that users are on Tinder to meet new people are discover new things. So it is a perfect place for a brand that has a story to come in and say, ‘here is a new thing’ and tell people that they can discover a new brand.”
Though he adds, “We are strict about the brands we work with. Starting out we wanted to make sure we got the product perfect for users. We have such a high bar for user experience, now we are opening up the platform which means we can invite more brands.”
For brands looking to make connections with millennials and forge new relationships with young, single consumers, Tinder could be just the social media platform they have been waiting for.
