Tinder Has a Choose Your Own Adventure Show For You
- Dating Apps, Meeting Men, Online Dating
In the ever-present battle to keep eyeballs and merge strange bedfellows, Tinder has gotten into the scripted programming business.
Once upon a time – back in 2001, when I was working for JDate – this would have been my dream come true. Telling funny, true, relatable dating stories that had the potential to teach a lesson and reach a wide audience? Sign me up as a writer!
But that was then and this is now. The very nature of Tinder is that people are too lazy to read profiles and write emails so now they swipe and text. So the solution to that is this?
The very nature of Tinder is that people are too lazy to read profiles and write emails.
“The project, called SwipeNight, consists of four episodes. One will air each week on the Tinder app. In each episode, users who participate will be ushered through an apocalyptic scenario and prompted to make a series of choices, from the seemingly unimportant (how to best D.J. a party) to the critical (whose life to save). The show features a cast of young diverse actors and, like a video game, gives the user a first-person perspective on the action.
Participants will then show up in each other’s lists of potential matches. Some of the choices they made during the show will be visible on their profiles. That is when, the company hopes, a number of those people will swipe right on each other and talk about what they experienced.”
Hey, maybe (definitely!), I’m not the demographic for SwipeNight. Still, I’m not exactly sure how this interactive game is supposed to work, especially given the Tinder CEO’s description of its target audience: “They speak in gifs, they react in emojis, they talk in stories,” said Elie Seidman, the chief executive of Tinder, of 18-to-25-year-olds, who already make up more than 50 percent of the app’s user base.
Given that Tinder invested $5 million in developing and producing this, I can only presume they have a clearer vision for how this benefits them than I do.
Your thoughts, below, are greatly appreciated.
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