Hinge's Furry App Icon Meets an Oracle in the Great Beyond

Where do apps go when they die? To the appterlife!

Hinge inspired such woeful wordplay with fresh ads in its “Designed to be Deleted” campaign from Wieden+Kennedy Portland.

In past iterations, we’ve seen the dating app’s Hingie icon/mascot meet its demise after facilitating successful matches.

Ads rolling out today take the concept further, as the widget—widgets, actually—enter a campy, non-denominational realm, greeted by comedian Patti Harrison as a wacky Oracle.

“Hinge’s brand proposition stands out in the dating world,” W+K art director Maggie Paris and copywriter Ellen Miller Schneider tell Muse. “They’ll help you find an authentic connection and then they want to be gone from your phone and your life. It’s refreshing. From the get-go, we set out to create something similarly distinctive”

“We began imagining what Hingie’s post-deletion existence might entail: What would it look like? Who would be there? What happens upon Hingie’s arrival?”

We’ve all wondered about that at some point. Now we know: The thing ascends to an immaculately art-directed paradise with celestial f/x achieved mostly in camera. 

Post mortem, we should all be so lucky. 

It feels like a zippy, eye-catching and somewhat confounding SNL skit. Or an elaborate in-joke that might be tough to comprehend on first viewing. Still, it sends the same-old straight to hell. And the Hingies are cuddly—in an artsy-craftsy nightmare sort of way.

“The first time we laid eyes on the Hingies in all their fuzzy glory remains a treasured memory,” according to Paris and Schneider. “The fabrication team and puppeteers really brought those little icons to life! Seeing Balloon Hingie float around the set was a formative moment for us all—very significant.”

Biscuit Filmworks’ Bine Bach directed. Targeting Gen Z, the push will run through summer across North America, the U.K. and Australia.

Match Group, known for slick marketing across its properties, owns Hinge.