'Camouflage is key and your asset must fluently speak her language' says Tinder Asia VP Daniel Kim

As Millenial and Gen Z consumers are bombarded with visual information every day, their brains have become better at digesting and categorising visual information than any other generation. This in turn will hurt marketers as their advertisements become filtered and the younger audience has a tendency to drop off when they look at branded content, according to Daniel Kim (pictured below), vice president of marketing, Tinder Asia.

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“When they try to digest certain content, they have this constant effort to think about the intent of the content,” said Kim who was speaking at a panel at MARKETING-INTERACTIVE's Content360 conference.

“Often when it comes to the brand side of things, when they acknowledge that something is an advertisement, they intuitively classify the content as advertisement which creates a barrier for brands to approach this consumer,” he added. As perfectly shot ads with brand messaging are falling out of favour, Kim emphasised that advertisements need to be focused on the conversations surrounding a brand’s offerings instead.

“When we try to not look like an ad, we have to think about the conversation that is generated when people try to find a solution for their problem,” Kim explained.

He brought up a 2022 Tinder Thailand activation where Tinder collaborated with a popular love shrine by placing stickers on the ground with their logo to show people that Tinder is there to support their love life.

Photo courtesy Celeste Sui, TikTok

“There is a belief system that when someone wants something such as career, wealth or love, they would pray to God,” added Kim.

Even without Tinder or other dating apps, there was already a need for finding genuine connections that is resolved through a certain way,

The activation was able to nudge the audience to achieve its objectives by partnering with their compensatory behaviour when they face a problem, according to Kim.

Leveraging UGC to magnify conversations

One of the ways brands can bypass this filtering system that Gen Z and Millennials are doing is to think about what conversation we want to own up to and what are the things people are willing to talk about, said Kim

“When we put the conversation first where people are already interested in trying to find what is the best way to find love out there, we managed to disguise our brand as part of the conversation and generate user-generated content,” he explained.

For example, when a singer had his world tour and came to India, Tinder put a man in a t-shirt that said “for single people only” with a QR code that led to his Tinder profile to put a conversation first before the brand.

Photo courtesy Shweta Kukreja, X

Tinder only asked the man to walk around the concert area and not do anything else which resulted in a lot of scans and memes such as “this is a great way to tell the story of how I met your mother” which kept the conversation going.

“It was getting picked up in other countries as well because there was a conversation that we were willing to talk about which is related to people wanting to connect and find love,” said Kim adding:

Camouflage is key and your asset must be fluently speaking her language

Tinder had a UGC go viral in Japan when a man who recently broke up with his girlfriend days before a wedding was seen swiping on Tinder instead of taking pictures of the bride and bridegroom as he was sitting in front.

“We bought the usage rights to this asset, and we just put the brand logo at the end because this is content worth consuming and conversations worth having,” also said Kim.

“A lot of UGC or assets that we design, create and push, we try to go away from as much as possible from what a brand would do and go closer to the conversation that people want to talk about,” he further explained.

Join us on 12 June 2024 for an exciting experience as Content360 makes its debut in Malaysia! Brace yourself to join the crème de la crème of the content marketing industry hailing from across the region. Immerse yourself in a dynamic atmosphere, and uncover the latest trends with thought leaders and solution providers from the realm of content.

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