Tinder: Swipe Night

How they made it

We reached out to the creative minds behind Tinder: Swipe Night to learn just how they made this Webby-winning interactive adventure. Hear from 72andSunny’s Senior Writer, Senior Art Director and Senior Film Producer, as well as M ss ng P eces’ Head of Immersion on working across teams to create a choose-your-own adventure to match Tinder users.

Timeline of the creative process

Inspiration: Tinder wanted to infuse its brand with new energy and make members excited about swiping again.

Workflow: For each project, we cast a team of people with clear but complementary roles, and stay in strong, frequent communication from the start of a brief to the final edit.

Results: A 50 page script. A branching narrative. 11 x shoot days. Over 140 final video files. All on a platform that had never held video before.

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Tips from the Team

"Believe in yourself. Believe in your idea. Believe in your partners. And don't give up until it's done." - 72andSunny

"Make clear goals and focus on them. You can spark new conversations and possibilities if you aren’t afraid to try." - Tinder

"Reward every decision you ask a player to make. Interactivity is a valuable tool, not a throwaway gimmick" - M ss ng P eces

See the full team

Inspiration

We also challenge ourselves to push past the ‘right answer’ to the ‘exciting answer’.

What was your inspiration?

Tinder wanted to infuse its brand with new energy and make members excited about swiping again.

Our unlock came in realizing that the Tinder app, with millions of active users, was our most powerful tool for marketing. We collectively put aside any talk of a traditional brand campaign, and joined forces with Tinder’s marketing and product teams to create a first-of-its- kind interactive entertainment experience on Tinder: Swipe Night.

How did you approach this challenge?

Our ambition at 72andSunny is to put unignorable creativity out in the world—ideas that grab your attention, move culture and ultimately spark action.

We do all the rigor—interrogate the business challenge, go deep into the lives of our audience, vet the production innovations and stay up to speed on the culture surrounding our brands.

But we also challenge ourselves to push past the ‘right answer’ to the ‘exciting answer’. We jump at the chance to do more than message at people by actually giving them something they want to talk about and do.

Workflow

In this industry we’re always told “don’t touch the product” –well, Tinder said the complete opposite and challenged their best-in-class product team to make Swipe Night possible.

How does your team work across capabilities and disciplines?

72andSunny was founded on the principle of collaboration long before it was trendy, or common. So the honest answer is, we don’t know any other way to work.

For each project, we cast a team of people with clear but complementary roles, and stay in strong, frequent communication from the start of a brief to the final edit—always with a healthy dash of debate.

One of our favorite mantras is ‘Be kind to each other, but hard on the work’ because great creative requires having those hard conversations, to get the very best out of each other. We do our best work when we’re deep in collaboration with our awesome clients, and this is a next-level example.

How does your approach adapt to the needs of a project?

At 72andSunny, we take a bespoke approach to every project. That said, the innovation inherent in all parts of Swipe Night was fairly exceptional and challenged us in new ways.

We created an interactive story rooted in moral quandaries, that required scripting out a branching narrative. It was shot vertically, in first person POV. It went live on Tinder, which had never before held video. And it affected your Tinder matches!

Every step of the process required re-thinking the ‘norm’. Ultimately though, it was our shared ambition and an incredible partnership between 72andSunny, Tinder’s product and marketing teams, M ss ng P eces and Karena Evans that allowed us to pull off what we did.

Was there anything out-of-the-box about your approach for this project?

In this industry we’re always told “don’t touch the product” –well, Tinder said the complete opposite and challenged their best-in-class product team to make Swipe Night possible.

It resulted in dynamic, creative storytelling, and innovation that impacted the dating lives of millions. And it was cool to create something in 2019 that was not accessible to everyone via the internet or on-demand media. You had to be on the Tinder app to experience it, and you had to tune-in at a specific time or you’d miss out. It was a true entertainment event.

Also, the storyline of impending doom was critical. Arguably weird for dating, but felt right-on for 2019. Little did we know, 2020 was coming for us!

How do you digitally manage your projects?

A 50 page script. A branching narrative. 11 x shoot days. Over 140 final video files. All on a platform that had never held video before.

Ultimately, as we were looking to create something new, there weren’t any existing tools that did exactly what we needed them to do. So we took pieces from lots of different places and built our own process.

There was definitely a lot to keep track of and there are hubs, naming conventions and processes that speak to every facet of the undertaking. But beyond any sort of management tool, collaboration and open communication were our best assets and the behaviors that allowed us to navigate the bumps along the way and still make something great.

How is the pandemic and remote working impacting your team?

In our current landscape, where 72andSunny is comprised of hundreds of satellite home offices, we lean on our strong foundation of collaboration that has gotten us this far, and take it a step further by getting crystal-clear in the agreements we make with one another upfront.

We are finding ways to more deeply respect each other’s time (e.g, make that deck shorter, please). Plus lots of Zoom-ing! Honestly, we are still figuring it out like everyone else.

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Results

On the Internet, you don’t get a second chance—you hit it or you don’t. This is a sign that we achieved what we set out to do: create something unignorable that was worth people’s time to experience and talk about.

Any advice for creative teams looking to make great digital work?

Keep dialing the purpose of what you’re making. At its inception, Swipe Night was a cool entertainment idea that could live on platform and create excitement for the brand.

But over time, and the more we collaborated with Tinder, the more we focused on honoring the core purpose of a swipe—which is to meet people. This insight led to some of the most imaginative, sticky and rewarding aspects of the experience.

What does being named "best of the Internet" mean to you?

On the Internet, you don’t get a second chance—you hit it or you don’t. This is a sign that we achieved what we set out to do: create something unignorable that was worth people’s time to experience and talk about. It’s a huge honor, thank you!