I will start this by saying that I know almost nothing about dating apps.  I’ve been married for over 25 years and when I first met my wife, our “dating apps” were the loaded potato skins at Bennigans.

The only thing I know about dating apps is that there are a lot of them.  As someone whose job is in the marketing world, I pay very close attention to business and industry where there is a lot of competition because that is where you generally see the most creative advertising.  From these ads, you can learn trends and techniques to make YOUR ads better, even if you aren’t competing with the company that the ads were created for.

This is where “Hingie” comes in.

Hingie is the mascot for a new dating app called Hinge.  The new campaign is “The App Designed To Be Deleted”.  The ad shows their mascot Hingie catching on fire, being shot with arrows, crushed, and other terrible endings.

This ad is brilliant.

Most ads for dating apps imply that you will be there for a while.  They generally do this unwittingly by offering long-term (yearly) memberships to their site.  I’ve been told that once you sign up on these sites, the pressure is on to get you to sign up for long term membership.  I haven’t yet tested this myself because I’m not sure how to explain to my wife that I signed up on a couple of dating websites as research.

As far as their ads go, Hinge gets right to the point.  We want you to install, find the right person, and delete us.  “Even if it kills us”.  I would imagine that this is what most people on dating websites actually want.  They don’t want to think about spending months or years on a website, clicking through stupid emails with cheesy pickup lines, swiping left or right.  They want to find the one and be done with the app.  Whether it will actually end up working out that way, Hinge knows what it’s customers want and gets right to the point in a way that none of its other competitors do.

This is what we can learn from this ad.   When you sit down to write your next ad or you are prepping your creative team.  Decide EXACTLY what your customers want and market DIRECTLY to that.  Hint: They might not just want the best deal.