Bumble / When Dating Met 2020

Empowering women to take control of their dating destinies.

Bumble was created to put women in the driver’s seat by inspiring them to ‘Make the First Move.’ Pre-COVID, this made sense. But through our research, we found women were feeling massive pressure in 2020 – like they’d lost a year, like the next date they went on HAD to be perfect, like they needed to find ‘the one’ NOW to get ‘back on track.’ Bumble couldn’t add to the stress with an out-of-touch pep talk about how ‘empowered’ they should be feeling. They needed to redefine what ‘Make the First Move’ meant in a post-covid world.

By forming an audience panel, we were able to glean specific insights into the key anxieties created by this pressure and used these to form the beats of a script designed to make young women feel seen during the toughest year for dating in living memory.

Working with director Cloé Bailly, we cast the BAFTA-winning Helena Bonham Carter in the role of an omniscient fairy godmother character who narrates a series of joyfully-imperfect lockdown dating scenarios. What looks like a tragi-comedy at first, crescendos into a rousing acknowledgment of everything our audiences has done to overcome dating adversity.

“This is so accurate - my life in 2020! I legit thought this was a tv show trailer and was totally getting into it.” - YouTube Viewer

Bonham Carter was outspoken following the shoot - teasing national press with her cheerleading tips for young women dealing with lockdown. Her advice to ‘get a vibrator and a weighted blanket’ was picked up by over 70 titles nationally.

A follow-up spot - You’ve Got This - was created in January to mark the busiest time of year for dating app downloads. Again, the film played on the anxieties standing in the way of our audience making the first move. Cut-downs from both films were used to create social content that - thanks to the campaign’s success - was adopted by multiple international markets, including Bumbles biggest, the US.

The films have received 3 million+ views on YouTube with a positive rating of 97% - almost unheard of for commercial content. What’s more, app downloads increased by 15% following the campaign launch.