Bumble Partners with Ted Lasso to Bring Fictional Bantr to Life

Image: Bumble

Dating app Bumble will offer a real-life Bantr on its platform, the fictional dating app made famous on hit TV series Ted Lasso.

Starting October 13th and through the end of the year on Thursdays at 7pm, Bumble is offering Bantr Live, and operates much like the fictional app, according to the company’s blog post. When you decide to play, you won’t be able to see or swipe on other daters’ profiles. Instead, you will be paired at random to strike up a text chat with someone who matches your location, age and gender preferences, but you won’t be able to see photos or their profile (just their name). Much like Bantr on Ted Lasso, these events are meant to spark conversation ahead of seeing what someone looks like to make for a more genuine match from the start.

Participants get three minutes to decide if they want to keep chatting, and then they are matched with the next participant to see if a connection can be made. At the end of the event, users can see who matched with them. At this point, they will be able to see the profiles and photos of these matches.

Bumble users can RSVP each week to the event and get reminders when it’s about to go live. Bumble users will also be able to redeem a free two-month subscription to Apple TV+, according to Variety.

How Bantr Live Works on Bumble

Image: Bumble

“As huge fans of ‘Ted Lasso,’ we were so excited to bring the Bantr Live experience to our community,” said Olivia Yu, Global VP of Partnerships, in a statement. “Bantr Live enables our community to connect with someone unexpected and learn more about a person before seeing them.”

Bumble’s Bantr Live seems to have also been inspired by the hit dating reality series Love is Blind, where contestants don’t see each other until the end of the series, after they decide whether they have made a connection. The difference is that in Ted Lasso, the Bantr match between two of the series’ stars played a major role in the storyline and led to a romantic connection, whereas in the reality series, the cast members generally haven’t been too thrilled with the results.

Other dating apps have tried to blur profiles and do other “reveals” to get people to connect first, but so far there hasn’t been much success. Maybe Ted Lasso will inspire something different.

Bantr Live will be available in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia through the end of the year. Bumble did not state if it plans to expand the service globally in the company year.

For more on this dating app, please check out our Bumble review.