Hot New Women! – Match.com Advertising Campaign

Hello all, this post discusses the ‘hot new women’ advertising campaign recently conducted by the online dating company match.com. Two adverts, the work of US agency Hanft Raboy & Partners, have been broadcast on British TV that in my opinion are simply brilliant.

The campaign is obviously focused on increasing subscribers to the match.com online dating service, but its the way its been implemented by that is really clever.

Understanding the Market Research
Online dating has traditionally and still is a male orientated market, with the main challenge for companies being to continually generate female users.

So what have match.com done?
Match.com, having the resources and ability to implement television advertising campaigns have released a series of 2 adverts. Both adverts use a mixture of hard advertising techniques (such as attention grabing alarms and repetition) that is now common place with most website ads, however it is worth mentioning that these ads are no where near as annoying as the aging Moonpig adverts.

Advert 1 – Attention Men

The first advert uses large letters and a voice over to announce that men should pay attention because match.com has too many women. Further animations of women and hearts accompany the message that their previous efforts in advertising and attracting millions of women in the past have been successful and as a result they now have too many women on their site. I remember seeing this advert only once and it was while i was watching top gear on some blokey channel such as Dave or Bravo. It did catch my attention and i remember thinking at the time that it was cleverly targeted. But the penny really dropped when i saw the second advert…

Advert 2 – Attention Women

(I will update and include the second advert as soon as it becomes available.. does anyone have a link?)

Again the advert uses Large letters, animated megaphones and a voice-over to announce that women should pay attention but this time the advert refers to the previous TV ad, stating that, they previously ran an ad targeted at men and now have lots of new guys on their site.
The clever bit is, i have seen this ad 4 or 5 times now, continually on female orientated tv channels, so what initially seemed to be an out of sync male focused ad campaign, came full circle and now continually targets women.. nice twist..

In Conclusion…
I thought this was a really clever concept and i like that even tho the ads use hard advertising techniques, they do feel conversational and almost real-time . I’m sure some people are gonna hate the ads but i think there should also be an appreciation for the thought and innovation that went into them :o)
Match.com seem to have made a step towards “Web 2.0” advertising where the TV adverts are communicating events and trends that are currently happening online on their website.

Does anyone else have any thoughts on these ads?

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Alex
Alex
15 years ago

Yes I think its very clever in another way too.

The advert directed at men only ran for a short period and the advert for women is still being aired. This is because women are the main people that register for dating sites and so match.com ran the first advert just so that the women saw it and then when they saw the second advert they have even more incentive to sign up.

Chewie
Admin
15 years ago

Yeah that’s very true Alex. I keep seeing the advert aimed at women now and its been a few weeks since the men’s version was aired.

leslie
leslie
15 years ago

Does anyone know what agency managed the campaign?

Chewie
Admin
15 years ago

Hi Leslie,

You should be able to find some information from http://www.hanftraboy.com/ as they conducted the campaign.

Account manager
Account manager
15 years ago

Inititative Media in London manage Match.com’s account.