So, first the basics of the dating app, Tinder (in case quarantine has put a damper on your dating life):
On the app you see images and very brief descriptions of people in your area. You want to meet someone, so you’re looking. And, at each viewing of a profile you quickly choose…
Swipe right and you’re interested.
Swipe left, and not so much.
Dating apps are nothing new, but what makes Tinder really different from other dating sites is speed. It was not built like match.com or eHarmony for long stories about people’s history or lists of all their attributes or why they are perfect for you. The profiles can’t go beyond 500 characters, with a maximum of six images.
The profiles have to sell themselves, and fast. This makes Tinder much like advertising today. Back in the early days of TV, brands could be much more Match-like and take their time — usually a full minute — to tell the viewer, who had no remote, all about themselves. Today, the place for those longer brand stories is most often on websites and YouTube channels. Now, advertising lives or dies in a Tinder world, where attention spans are short and messages are many.
However, because not everyone looking for companionship is a copy-writer, advice abounds on the web for making a great Tinder profile — much of which bears a remarkable resemblance to the cliff notes on making great ads. These repeatedly include how vital it is to:
- Use humor
- Be genuine
- Pick active images
- Not be dull
- Get to the point
- Be engaging
Because here’s what all people who have found success getting right-swiped on Tinder have learned:
Being seen is not the same as creating interest.
Even if your profile was remembered the next day, and potential paramours remembered your pics and your name, if you didn’t interest those viewers, you got a lot of left swipes and an evening alone, in front of the TV with cold pizza.
The same holds true for advertising. Ads that are found interesting engage with viewers and can start or strengthen a beautiful brand relationship. Ads that are recalled but don’t create interest get left swipes from consumers, leaving products alone on the shelves. Yet, in the world of advertising research, there remain many measures of whether an ad was simply seen, including recall of a brand’s name, as proof that money was not indeed wasted. But recall is not enough to fully understand if there was interest — if the ad had the potential to get a right swipe.
This is not just theory. Our research shows that recall of an ad and interest in an ad are in fact uncorrelated; they do not measure the same thing. The semantic part of our brain’s memory system can recall having seen and read and heard things all day long. But the two other parts of that system of memory we all use — those emotional and physical rehearsal aspects — are what respond most profoundly to advertising, creating that relationship with the brand, and driving motivation to engage.
It is motivating branded communications that advertisers seek. And to know if your advertising has the potential to motivate, you need to know more than how well it’s recalled. You need to know if it’s interesting. Because that’s what will get consumers to put a ring on your brand. Or put another way, in the now-famous words attributed to a former Walmart CMO, we are not in business to be noticed; we are in business to be chosen.
By: Eldaa Daily, Research Director (eldaa@ameritest.com)
Eldaa is a Research Director at Ameritest. She leverages Ameritest’s proprietary visual diagnostic tools to deliver actionable branded communication insights to her clients.
To find out how your advertising can get a right swipe, visit www.ameritest.com.
