The Meets Are So Darn Cute in Tinder's New Commercials

How does Tinder serve the meets in its latest commercials created with Mischief @ No Fixed Address?

Cute. Damn cute.

Fans wouldn’t want it any other way.

Smuggler’s Rubberband (aka Jason Sondock and Simon Davis) lensed romcom-inspired “It Starts With a Swipe” scenarios in superbly sappy TV-movie style.

First, a young woman tumbles from a library ladder. It’d sure be cute if some cute guy caught her in his arms. Lana Condor and Evan Mock star.

“On the first practice run of falling from the ladder, the actor almost fell for real,” recalls Mischief ECD Bianca Guimaraes. “She threw herself back so fearlessly that her co-star almost dropped her. We were all like, ‘Holy shit!'”

Next, during a storm, two smitten kittens hail a cab:

Note the license plate. Subtle.

Finally, rain beats down on a couple in a field of flowers (alas, with no cabs anywhere in sight).

“The production crew had to hire a snake wrangler on ‘Rain,'” Guimaraes says. “The guy was walking around to grab snakes and move them away from the set.”

Cute story. Icky, but cute.

As for the overall approach, “Daters today are nostalgic for the meet-cutes they’ve seen in old romcoms,” says Stephanie Danzi, SVP of marketing at Tinder. “But the reality is that the rom-com meet-cute is the exception, not the rule. Tinder is where modern-day meet-cutes happen.”

Of course, romcom spoofs are as common as broken hearts. Still, Tinder succeeds by nodding to genre conventions while not overloading on satire. The campaign zings a treasured (if trite) art-form, good-naturedly goofing on its audience’s tastes.

“Only 8 percent of offline daters say it’s easy for them to find a date IRL, and so many missed out on opportunities to connect in the midst of the pandemic,” adds brand CMO Melissa Hobley. “At Tinder, we want to empower our users to find meaningful connections that carry into IRL.”

Showing text convos during the spots—these exchanges are very non-Hollywood, natch—reinforces that notion. The app experience fuses with real-life hopes and expectations, sparking enough cuteness to make viewers smile, scream, sigh … or whatever.