The dating app world is still often associated with casual sex. What makes Match different from apps like Tinder, is that users are really looking for a serious relationship. But commitment, unlike casual sex, is often considered boring and uncool. So our job was to make commitment sexy again. We created the tagline “If commitment turns you on, download Match”. For a person that is looking for a serious relationship, there’s nothing more exciting than the first signs of commitment: from making space in the wardrobe for the partner, to moving in together. So we hooked people with a sexy beginning to end up on a sign of commitment. Another important point for us was also to showcase all the possible couples out there.
It was really important for us to have the widest and most inclusive possible representation of the dating world out there, in terms of gender, sexual orientation, and race (especially for this last one, we had to have a couple fights with the client), so we are really proud of the final result, that got us 2 shortlists at Eurobest in 2019 and a Silver at Epica Awards.


This project is:
Client-commissioned

Agency
Marcel

My Role in This Project
The brief was to set Match as the dating app for committed people. To make commitment not something boring, but something cool and sexy. While joking about it, we wrote down the beginning of a sexy sentence, but twisting it with a sign of commitment. A series of totally gender-free lines that respectfully use sex to twist it into commitment. We thought it was perfectly in line with our times: it’s okay to joke about sex freely, inclusively, and respecting any kind of couple.
Then, something happened. The feminist french group “LesLionesses” used our campaign and twisted it into headlines against any form of violence against women: “I want your fingers… where they belong, and it’s NOT on my body.” We thought it was great at first, because we are on the same side, fighting the same battle everyday. But then we discovered that they were actually attacking the campaign, whoever was behind it (a team of two female creatives in this case), all just to attack our agency, that was on everyone’s lips because a manager was accused of sexual harassment. That’s why at the time, the agency asked us to ignore and remain silent. This is our only regret, because we would have loved to start a dialogue and hear each other's point of view: we support the group and understand their final goal, but we found their ways completely wrong. We felt used, and victims of the same system we are all trying to fight. We learned that in the future, we want to be advertisers in a world where women support women, without using unfounded pretexts to attack others. It's through creative work that we can make the world more inclusive, and these kinds of battles shouldn’t use the toxic manners that they are fighting against.