Low Budget Marketing: Puppy Love on Tinder

Low Budget Marketing: Puppy Love on Tinder

Written by: Low Xuan

For love seeking singles, Tinder has been known as the dating application that connects people with the swipe of a finger. However, animals apart from human are not known to have accounts on the platform. Social Tees Animal Rescue has grabbed this opportunity to raise awareness about animal adoption issue using Twitter. The organization collaborated with the BBH Creative Agency and created a campaign on Tinder to connect people with dogs.

Social Tees Animal Rescue is a not-for-profit organization in New York City that protects abandoned animals from kill shelters and provides them with a safe haven and veterinary care with strictly no-kill policy. The ultimate goal for the organization is to help these animals find their proper forever homes (Rescue, 2018). As a not-for-profit organization, limited budget is always the crucial problem while organizing a campaign. After understanding the characteristics that Tinder is for seeking love and matching with people nearby, The Barn and Social Tees launched this campaign and successfully created buzz on the issue both online and offline.

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The campaign idea is simple, which is to tell people to try on a relationship with a dog. The Barn created ten individual profiles for the dogs that were rescued by Social Tees and ready for adoption. Anyone within a mile of Social Tees’ location would receive these dogs’ profile on Tinder and are able to swipe left or right just like how the matching system works on other “normal” Tinder accounts. Swiping left means not interested in the dog, while swiping right means adopting it. However, this does not necessarily equate to the actual adoption. Once the users choose to “adopt” the dog, invitation for meeting up with the dog will be sent to him or her. The users are offered the chance to volunteer at the local animal shelter, taking the dog for a “no strings attached” walk at the park, go for a “short-term relationship” by fostering the dog for a couple weeks, or even fully committing with an adoption. It is pretty much like the relationship on Tinder, where users usually meet-up and try on a short-term relationship or even getting married after that (Zoe , 2014)

Other than the online profiles, The Barn also released a 45s video explaining why there are dogs’ profile on Tinder. This was especially important as it allowed the media to pass around easily and make the news shareable online.

To evaluate the result, we should look back at the campaign objectives. The aims of the campaign were to raise awareness of the animal abandon issues in order to help the animals to find a proper house. Considering Tinder is a free application and there were $0 spent on media, Puppy Love on Tinder had achieved a great marketing performance. The campaign received more than 1,500 doggie-human matches within the first 24 hours. Moreover, it has received more than 55,000,000 media impressions in 95 countries throughout the campaign, which created a global awareness on the need for animal adoption. (Smith, Powers, Taylor, & Nystrom, 2016). Considering the campaign results and the “relationships” it brought together, who says one can’t find true love on Tinder?

References

b/60. (2014, Aug 5). Tinder Creates ‘Puppy Love’ to Match People with Abandoned Dogs. Retrieved from Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3w1eSBXQl8

Kemp, S. (2018, Jan 30). DIGITAL IN 2018: WORLD’S INTERNET USERS PASS THE 4 BILLION MARK. Retrieved from We Are Social: https://wearesocial.com/uk/blog/2018/01/global-digital-report-2018

Love, P. (2014, Aug 1). Puppy Love. Retrieved from Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAgy1vATA7w

Modern Dog. (2014). Puppy Love on Tinder. Retrieved from Modern Dog: https://moderndogmagazine.com/articles/puppy-love-tinder/65589

Rescue, S. T. (2018, March 5). About us. Retrieved from Social Tees Animal Rescue: https://www.socialteesnyc.org/about-social-tees

Smith, L., Powers, M., Taylor, L., & Nystrom, M. (2016, Nov 17). Puppy Love on Tinder. Retrieved from ISSUU: https://issuu.com/luketaylor10/docs/arthur_page_case_study-_puppy_love_

Zoe , H. (2014, Aug 4). Tinder is Helping Users Find Puppy Love–With Actual Puppies. Retrieved from Inc.: https://www.inc.com/zoe-henry/tinder-partners-with-animal-shelther-to-connect-users-with-puppies.html