Tinder showed support for diversity and love by creating a petition for interracial couples to be represented on emoji keyboards. The campaign leveraged earned, owned, and paid media to amplify the message around the world.
Objective and Context:
In February 2015, emojis became more diverse. Different skin tones and same-sex couples became available on the keyboard. But interracial couples were excluded from this update. Tinder wanted to create a narrative about dating in the digital age and the importance of fostering love in all its forms, so it created the “#RepresentLove” campaign.
The overall objective for the campaign was to change brand perception from that of a tech company known for its “hook up” app to that of a company with heart that stood for something. Tinder wanted to demonstrate its commitment to representing its diverse user base in modern day visual language, emojis.
Target Audience:
Tinder’s target is largely comprised of young singles, between the ages of 18 and 25. The target tends to skew female. These people are actively dating and looking for new experiences, fun, and adventure.
The average Tinder user cares about social justice and wants to impact positive change in his or her community. He or she respects and engages with brands that value diversity, inclusion, equality, and female empowerment. The Tinder target is a digital native and someone who is engaging with social media and visual language (e.g., emojis and gifs) every day.
Creative Strategy:
Tinder set out to highlight its commitment to fostering diversity and inclusion. The creative strategy of the campaign was to spark an emotional response from Tinder users, media, and general consumers. The tone was authentic, inclusive, and bold.
Overall Campaign Execution:
The brand created a public petition and robust communications campaign to highlight the importance of not only interracial representation on emoji keyboards, but also in real life. The campaign was called “ #RepresentLove,” and it petitioned Unicode, the computing industry standard, to add interracial couple emojis to the official consortium.
The communications plan leveraged paid, earned, and owned media to achieve its goals. Tinder conducted a global study regarding the attitudes of offline and online daters around their openness to interracial dating. Tinder shared these findings widely and used the findings to validate the brand’s mission to have interracial couples represented as emojis.
A landing page housed all the campaign information, including the anthem video and a call to action about signing the petition. Social channels amplified messaging to existing users and brand fans. Paid social ads promoted video views and drove clicks to the petition among both brand fans and general consumers that fell within the target demographic.
Mobile Execution:
Tinder launched a user-generated content campaign on social, asking couples to post photos of themselves in support of the cause. In exchange for that act, the couples received an "emojified” version of themselves. This was executed across three time zones and designers responded in real time with the bespoke emojis inspired by the user’s photo.
The #RepresentLove program far surpassed original KPIs. The program garnered more than 1.789 billion impressions globally, demonstrating Tinder’s global reach in markets like the U.S., U.K., France, Spain, Germany, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Australia, India, and Russia.
The #RepresentLove program resulted in more than 17 percent new and re-downloads of the app during the campaign timeframe as compared to previous weeks. This shows that the program’s messages resonated not only with new users, but also with lapsed users who had deleted the app; reengaging the latter subset was a win for the brand.
In addition, #RepresentLove drove digital and social conversation around the brand, including 5.2 million YouTube video views and close to 50,000 signatures on the change.org petition. The campaign earned 5.4 million digital ad impressions, including video view through rates of over 30 percent, surpassing industry benchmarks.
