With over 43 billion matches to date, Tinder is the world’s most popular app for meeting new people. Swipe Night is an interactive miniseries that lives on Tinder and transforms the app by using entertainment as a way to match people. It reimagines how a brand can tell stories - instead of pushing brand messaging, it uses pure, Hollywood-standard storytelling inside the app itself to create more meaningful, real-world connections.

?Integrated live-action entertainment into a dating app for the first time

?Drew more viewers than some of the world’s top TV shows

?Hybrid between marketing, technology, entertainment, and gaming

Tinder, the pioneer of dating apps, launched in 2012 as a modern alternative to existing overly-complex desktop options. Through its revolutionary mobile-first UX and introduction of the now universally recognized swipe, it quickly became the leading platform for young people to connect.

But after seven years, Tinder was facing steep competition from other dating apps and user fatigue, particularly among 18-25 year olds. For digitally native Gen Z, swiping on Tinder amounted to a mindless pastime, not an engaging way to meet and connect with other young people. While we contemplated creating a traditional marketing campaign to shift perceptions, we realized that the most powerful tool for resetting their relationship with Tinder was Tinder itself. Our goal was to give Gen Z singles a more meaningful way to match, while breathing new energy and cultural relevance into the Tinder brand.

Swipe Night is a first-of-its-kind, live-action, interactive miniseries produced and engineered to live solely inside the Tinder app where you make a series of choices that drive your personalized story forward and impact who you can match with. The choices are the key: while fun on the surface, they reveal something deep about your personality, give you a pool of more compatible users to choose from, and serve as icebreakers after the experience. For example, will you save the frightened puppy or the injured girl? You only have seven seconds to decide.

By bringing entertainment into the app to engineer compatibility, Swipe Night is a brand new way for people to match and connect. It was made to instill excitement and intention back into Tinder and ended up pushing the online dating industry forward.

Most dating sites have lengthy compatibility questionnaires and complex matching algorithms, but with a simple swipe, Tinder made online dating easy and fun. But today, with over 50% of its users between 18-25, Tinder needed to cater to a new generation who grew up on dating apps; they were hard to impress and increasingly disgruntled by the superficiality of the Tinder experience (especially women). They craved an experience that went beyond surface level profiles, and allowed them to connect with others on a deeper level -- but without getting too serious. Through interrogating the adage “actions speak louder than words,” we set out to build a revolutionary experience right into the Tinder app - designed to engage Gen Z in a cultural moment and help them form more meaningful connections with one another. It’s entertainment with purpose.

It’s Sunday night and you open Tinder, but instead of swiping on people, you enter a live-action, first-person POV, apocalyptic adventure where you swipe to make high-stakes, highly-revealing decisions. With just seven seconds to choose, you have to go with your gut. Each choice results in a unique story path filled with easter eggs like influencer cameos and features like haptic feedback, push notifications from characters, and a live-view counter to see the number of people playing. After each 5-8 minute episode, you enter Night Mode: a redesigned version of Tinder that pools more compatible users and displays their choices- providing plenty of icebreakers.

This four-part miniseries was built by an unprecedented team including Gen Z creators, Tinder engineers who enabled in-app streaming video for the first time, and a game designer who crafted a branching narrative with thousands of plotlines, seamlessly blending interactive storytelling with Tinder’s iconic swipe feature.

Swipe Night created a cultural moment that disrupted the norms of dating, entertainment and beyond, reclaiming Tinder’s throne as the dating-app innovator.

Millions of people tuned in.

?More viewers than the entire 2018/2019 seasons of some of TV’s most popular shows,

including Saturday Night Live and The Bachelorette.

?The premiere had 4x the viewership of the pilot episode of HBO’s Gen Z hit Euphoria.

It enhanced their Tinder experience.

?26% increase in matches over a typical Sunday night

?12% increase in messages among matches in the US

Culture took notice in a big way.

?4 billion earned impressions

?1640% spike in Twitter mentions of Tinder upon release

?Dubbed everything from “Product? Experience? TV Show?” to “The Future of Dating”

reinforcing its first-of-its-kind and hard-to-classify nature

?Named “one of the most innovative video companies of 2020” by Fast Company

Swipe Night will launch internationally and a second season is in development.