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Wieden + Kennedy Advertising OkCupid

OkCupid gives new meaning to the phrase DTF in dating app’s first-ever campaign

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By Minda Smiley, Reporter

January 2, 2018 | 5 min read

OkCupid wants singles to know that its users are DTF, but not in the way you might think.

OkCupid image

Image from OkCupid campaign

The dating app is unveiling its first-ever marketing push this week with a slew of out-of-home posters and digital posts that give new meaning to the acronym. Instead of “down to fuck,” OkCupid is replacing the F with clever - and more family-friendly - terms like “fifty-five-hour binge,” “filter out the far right” and “forget our baggage.”

Launching in Portland, New York and Austin, the campaign is part of OkCupid’s effort to position the app as one that can help you find a relationship, not just a hookup.

“What OkCupid has done is essentially lean into the idea that you’re more than a picture,” said OkCupid chief marketing officer Melissa Hobley. “We’ve invested a significant amount of time and money to make the product really reflect that.”

Over the past year, OkCupid has made a number of changes to the app to help it better mirror its “more substance than selfie” mantra. Last month, it rolled out a feature called Discovery that lets users search for people via shared interests and passions.

The brand also recently announced that users will be asked to use actual names rather than goofy usernames like DaddyzPrincess29 in their profiles, a move that received swift backlash from users who prefer the anonymity that OkCupid offers. The app quickly responded to criticism by stating that users don’t need to use their “real/legal” name in their profiles, but can’t use numbers or symbols either.

As the 13-year-old dating platform aims to modernize itself to better compete with the likes of Tinder and Bumble, Hobley said launching the campaign at the start of January makes sense since there tends to be a “really big uptake in dating app behavior” in the new year.

“The time was right for OkCupid to launch a campaign because we have done so much exciting work in terms of the experience, and we want people to think about that,” she said.

This move by OkCupid comes at a time when its dating app rivals like Bumble, continue to diversify their offering. Bumble no longer markets itself solely as a dating app, but now includes features such as Bumble Date and Bumble Bizz, promoting the app's use among those who are not looking to date. Moreover, the app that encourages women to make the first move, has further underlined its feminist beginnings by featuring women like Serena Williams and Priyanka Chopra Jonas in its ad campaigns.

Despite the strong ad campaigns from Tinder, Bumble and OkCupid, we have seen Hinge refuse to bow to pressure. Branding itself as the "ad that is designed to be deleted", the company's CEO Justin Mcleod recently revealed that the brand would not be launching any ad campaigns as: "If you run ads, then you need people to spend a lot of time on your platform so that you get a lot of ad impressions, and we're trying to get you to spend less time in the app."

Created by Wieden + Kennedy, the campaign’s imagery will appear on billboards, bus wraps, and coffee sleeves in addition to digital and social. The photography for the campaign was shot by artists Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari.

The choice to use the phrase “DTF” in the campaign is one that Hobley said stemmed from the many pivotal moments that women have experienced over the past year, like the Women’s March and #MeToo movement. By taking a term that is commonly used by men in a demeaning way and changing it to one that can mean anything, Hobley is hoping the campaign’s message will resonate with women.

“When you subvert or change the meaning of a phrase that most often is used in a derogatory sense, you kind of take back the power,” she said. “We realized that we could take this phrase and let people make it what they want it to be.”

OkCupid: advert-body-1 by Wieden+Kennedy New York

By OkCupid

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Wieden + Kennedy Advertising OkCupid

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