On Wednesday evening, a motley group of different journalists accepted an app provider’s invitation and didn’t know exactly why. The meeting point given on the invitation were coordinates that led to a location that seemed to have been chosen at random, in the center of the Berlin RAW site in Friedrichshain. The invited guests stood around looking for clues and waited for better times.
It suddenly became clear that the date, time and place had not been mistaken: The drag queen Bambi Mercury came around the corner and, in front of a gray backdrop, attracted a bit of attention with the help of an unusual headdress – an oversized, red heart in which dramatically stuck an arrow with a thick drop of blood dangling from its tip.
The setting and the general confusion meant that Mercury was initially perceived as a kind of place name sign: “Yes, this is the right place for you!” The elaborate costumes should probably also provide information about what the whole secrecy is about. Namely about love, or about what is commonly understood as the effective search for the same. Yes, the dating app Tinder was actually behind this happening. You know, the thing where you can swipe your finger left or right across the phone screen for broken hearts or romance.
Tinder has plastered the city with colorful advertising
And why all the fuss? That’s a good question – because nobody really noticed anything, according to the motto: I see something that you don’t see. Tinder has plastered the city with colorful ads and nobody is talking about it. So now Tinder is promoting its ads.
The company could have done that much faster and, above all, drier. A short e-mail with the subject: “Dear editors, look out the window, there’s advertising from us, and now please write about it, because ‘Tinder’ is somehow still a phenomenon of the species Gen-XYZ… blah blah”. But then it could have happened that the journalistic result was a bit critical.
That’s why Tinder probably thought they would lure the journalists with riddles and then invite them to an exclusive one – maybe it was also called intimate? – Tinder dinner. The rest can then be summed up quite briefly, because the further course of the evening was as uniform as the advertising itself. Essentially, it was shouted very loudly: “Hello, we exist, we are here. Huhu, we are very practical and simple. Hello, hello, we’re even hip, after all, our target group is not only under 25, but also queer, colorful and trallala. And very, very important, we are NOT the app for the quick number”. Yes what now?
To give the whole thing a bit of added value, a little praise: If you then know that the advertising exists, then it even catches your eye. The posters mainly show young people dressed in flashy 70s costumes. The cast, the poses, the environments and everything together seems so artificial that you would think an AI would have dreamed it up. But because that is somehow consistent and the whole effort is somehow also likeable, we quickly remind ourselves that in addition to Tinder, there is also Bumble, Hinge, Grindr, Parship, the classifieds and the self-painted notice with tear-off numbers.
