I’m not DTF, OKCupid

For the last few weeks, I noticed a lot of pop art style, beautiful billboards from OKCupid all around San Francisco. Every time I saw one, it would really annoy me. Why? Normally I love this style of, I guess, art, so I’m struggling internally to *unpack all the emotions*.

DOESN’T EVEN MAKE SENSEI hate pander

That’s probably my number one reason. I’ll go into intent and execution later, but there is no question that OKCupid’s marketing team went straight for city millenial gonads here.

My generation probably proliferated the acronym communication style predicated by the explosion of cheap messaging devices and apps… and maybe so that our parents couldn’t easily decode our top-secret teenage chats (btw omfg he said brt & irl he didn’t wth).

Pander is hard to get right and evoke proper or desired emotional responses and largely ends up feeling disingenuous and not creative. San Francisco, having a high density tech industry, has many SaaS billboard ads on Highway 101 loaded with poop emojis and tech speak stereotypes. These advertisers really fingered the market here to be either overgrown children or enginerds with purchasing power.

Actually not the worst ones out there

Pander marketing is the Peter Pettigrew of advertising. You won’t know immediately, but something definitely smells weird.

For it to work, intent and execution must be at 100%

Part of the inner struggle was that I actually like how these ads look. They’re beautiful, and after a quick Google search, a pretty well-respected agency and artists worked on this campaign.

From AdWeek:

The dating site rethinks that blunt old acronym, originally meaning “down to fuck,” by making it the centerpiece of a new campaign from Wieden + Kennedy New York — with the F word replaced by dozens of enlightened alternatives, leading to phrases like “down to feel fabulous,” “down to forget our baggage” and “down to fight about the president.”The point being: Dating can and should be about more than hookups. The tagline is, “Dating deserves better.”

That is a TALL order sirs and ma’ams. I’d argue that the intent was to “redefine DTF.” Here’s where things fall apart.

First, a technicality: if the word keeps changing in the definition of an acronym…well that’s not how acronyms work.

Second, for trying to redefine DTF, there are still some suggestive images in their campaign:

My power hold on your butt is my way of saying, this date is meaningful

Now, I’m no prude, but I’m having difficulty seeing the distinction between “this will lead to sexy time” vs “this is a depiction of a very deep and meaningful date activity that does not transact to sex.”

The major emphasis, visually, even over the illustrations of the “enlightened alternative” to fucking, is DTF. The extreme high contrast on this text, and the tertiary captions for the tagline and the new F phrase, makes it clear that DTF is the first thing the marketers wanted people to see.

As an attention grabber, it works quite well. ‘I can’t believe there are DTFs splattered everywhere in public.’ ‘Billboards banned for being phallic’ (actual headline). However, none of the illustrated date activities matter after a big, thick, D.T.F. ‘DTF’ overpowers all of the other elements of this otherwise very beautiful campaign.

My first thought was, ‘Oh OKCupid is going after the horny market. Watch out Grindr/Tinder/{insert free dating app here}!” Alas, if I am to believe that this was a genuine attempt to redefine the brutal, predatory online dating world out there, and make OKCupid the quality relationship building destination, the whole campaign felt a little flaccid.

I’m not DTF, OKCupid was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.