Marketing

It looks like Plenty of Fish has a new advertising and marketing plan aimed at young adults and it involves celebrities. The first hint of this new tactic was when PlentyOfFish.com appeared in a Flo Rida video for the song Available (see Story). At first I thought it was a strictly a promotional partnership between the dating site and Flo (POF is in the video, so the dating site will then promote Flo Rida) but now I am not so sure. I have a feeling POF basically paid to be included in the video for the publicity.

Plenty Of Fish now has a new promotion featuring Lady Gaga. At each concert stop on The Monster Ball tour, two singles can win a "date of a lifetime". The date includes tickets to the concert and backstage passes. To enter the contest you can visit the Lady Gaga page on POF.

It definitely looks like POF is trying to attract young adults to their dating site by being associated with popular music artists. I wonder if they will be doing other advertising, besides using the internet, to promote this new contest?

For a bit more on the story, read the press release. To find out what singles are saying about POF, read our Plentyoffish.com review.

Match.com spent around £6m on advertising in the United Kingdom according to Nielsen. Hanft Raboy and Partners previously held the Ad account for Match.com in the UK but this year the new marketing director, Karl Gregory decided on using Mother instead.

The only details we have on the new marketing campaign so far is, it starts in the new year, and it will attempt to engage people at an emotional level.

For the full story visit Marketing Magazine and to find out more about this UK dating site, read our Match.com UK review.

The Yahoo marketing department must of reviewed Yahoo Personals lately. There are no real graphic changes but the wording has been updated on the homepage. The first thing I notice was the new page title. A few months ago it was:

Find Singles with the Top Online Dating Site -- Yahoo! Personals

Short and sweet, with the dating site name at the end. This wouldn't have been my first choice but let's see if the new one is any better:

The dating sites BlackSingles.com and HurryDate (both part of Spark Networks) have partnered with Eizzil Entertainment in a marketing campaign for the movie "SPEED-DATING". The movie is slated for a 2010 release and is a feature length romantic comedy starring Mekita Faiye and co-starring Clint Howard and Chris Elliott (among others). As part of a combined U.S. national promotion tour, Spark Networks and Eizzil Entertainment will present BlackSingles.com and HurryDate events in 12 major cities across the country.

For the full press release, visit SOA World Magazine and for more information on the movie, visit the SPEED-DATING website (including a full cast list). To find further details about the dating service for African-Americans mentioned in this post, read our review of BlackSingles.com.

The latest video for the track Available by Flo Rida is featured only at Plenty of Fish. This song is off his new album R.O.O.T.S. and contains Flo Rida surfing the Plenty of Fish dating site on a laptop looking through profiles and singing about being a single man. Flo must be serious about dating since he was only viewing members who had upgraded their membership. 😀

I am not sure how this partnership between Flo Rida and Plenty of Fish came about? Did Plenty of Fish pay to be in the video? Both parties benefit from the partnership and increased media exposure. The video is on a site that gets millions of hits a month, which is good for Flo Rida anda younger audience than usual will be visiting Plenty of Fish to check out the new video and possibly create a dating profile as well.

For more information on this dating site, read our review of Plenty of Fish.

It seems to me, part of AshleyMadison.com marketing strategy is trying to buy ad time or space for advertising that they know will be rejected by the publishers. This way they get free publicity when the media write about AshleyMadison.com problems. Recently they had a Super Bowl TV ad rejected (see Story) and back in 2007 Microsoft denied their ads from showing on their Microsoft Network web portal (see Story). There have been other incidents as well, including a bill board in New York City.

The most recent print ad problem deals with a $20,000 ad in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The advertisement was suppose to run 2 days after U.S. Sen. John Ensign's confirmed an extramarital affair with a women who worked on his campaign. The publisher of the paper decided the ad was not right for their paper and did not run it.