Advertisement & Expectation

19Apr06

Any online dating site that purports to make dating easy is probably baloney. Now most dating sites wont say this outright, but it is clear that their actions reflect that desire, which is predatory in nature because it seeks to cash in on the vulnerability of its users. This is the same way that advertisements for pharmaceuticals approach their target audience. Take Allegra for example…

It is a decongestant, antihistamine, and apparently FUN! Not only will you be able to breathe easily, you will be able to surf on fields of wildflowers! Ahhh! Most all ads do this, showing a beautiful woman eating Doritos, a Hummer blazing through the Grand Canyon with its driver looking down at his son with a cowboy’s nod, “don’t worry, we’ll get you to soccer practice, Timmy.” These ads show nature being tamable, fatty food being not fatty, beautiful men and women being ubiquitous… this is nothing new, and most of us have grown accustomed to their presence. But people most often buy based on recommendation, use text messaging because their friends do, listen to The White Stripes because the other hipsters do, etc… and in regard to dating, people find dates most often through social social situations and by introductions by friends. So it is appalling to see the ad-work done by dating sites, some more illicit than others, that attempts to remove dating from the social sphere and place it on an unattainable pedestal. Even the ads that are sexually innocuous still portray only beautiful couples, and portray them at the peak of mythical romantic happiness, having just found their ‘soul-mate’. And that’s the only picture we get of ‘Marge and Jim, married June 2005’.

The real problem here is the setting of expectations. It is true that if you expect not much from someone, you will most likely receive ‘not much’, nor will you contribute much; and if you expect a lot from someone, you will mostly likely receive wonderful returns, and make a considerable investment yourself. But if you are an online dating site, and you are feeding people the notion that their expectations should be X (“I can find the love of my life here! This site makes it easy!”, for example), then you are being imperious, treating your clients as if they should be manipulated. Guess what, your clients should not be manipulated. If there are any expectations that you should try to encourage your users to adopt, they should be “I can be true to myself here,” and “I feel valuable here.” This not done through ads, and not through success stories, and not through press releases, but from the ground up, by a reputation rooted in genuine caring.

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