matchukmd’s blog

Penguin and match.com have just launched www.penguindating.co.uk , a service which brings together book lovers and dating for the very first time. Taking romance into the 21^st century, Penguin has partnered with us to ensure their readers have the best chance of finding love online.

The launch of www.penguindating.co.uk will offer Penguin readers a place to meet and indulge in the age old art of writing love letters as the boom in online dating fast restores the importance of the written word to modern courtship.

 To help them in their quest to find a fellow literary lover, Penguin readers will be asked to write about the last book they read in their profile and can use match.com’s ‘matchwords’ search feature to hunt through the site’s thousands of registered profiles by their favourite book, be it Adele Parks or Kafka.

The partnership between Penguin and match.com will be supported by a comprehensive PR and marketing push, including promotions across Penguin’s websites, monthly and author newsletters. There will also be a series of end page adverts in over two million of Penguin’s most popular fiction titles, encouraging Penguin readers to visit www.penguindating.co.uk and meet fellow book lovers. 

Penguin’s Digital Marketing Director Anna Rafferty said:  “Sometimes a book is a disposable adventure, an entertaining, temporary distraction that you don’t think about again once you’ve read the last page.  But sometimes a book means so much more; at Penguin we believe that the books we cherish and read over and over, those that we feel a deep emotional connection with, say something defining about us and the type of people we are.  ‘What are you reading / what did you last read / who’s your favourite author?’ are all standard first date questions and what better way to find your life partner than over a shared love for Lawrence or a passion for Pynchon?  We knew there was an opportunity for this type of service for our audience, and the Penguin community provides the perfect forum to meet a likeminded special someone. However, to create this new service successfully, we wanted to partner with the world leaders in online dating to ensure we could provide the best quality of experience.”

On my part this partnership with Penguin gives us a unique opportunity to successfully match lovers of literature. Here at match.com we are all about making people successful in their search for that perfect someone. A shared interest in specific authors or the desire to discuss literature can be compelling signifiers of potential compatibility. Also, we see every day that the written word has become increasingly important in modern day romance and the process of falling in love. Its true to say that online dating has returned us to the romantic notions of traditional letter writing where thousands of singles express themselves in the written form and successfully get to know each other over email.

We’ve just lanched a new TV marketing campaign to follow on from the strong start to the year for the UK’s biggest online dating service. In the first half of 2008, our site recorded seven of its busiest days ever and the summer tactical ad buy will see an additional investment of £1m to capitalise on the growing popularity of finding love online.

The ‘Too Many Women’ campaign is cheeky and fun but it also illustrates the fact that online dating is now a very popular choice for women. Internet dating is becoming as widely accepted as shopping or banking online – almost everyone knows someone who has found love by logging on. Over 4.6 million people have signed up to match.com in the UK alone to date marking, categorically, that online dating is now the new natural way to find love.

The campaign will compliment our existing ‘Don’t Wait For Cupid and Fate’’ advertising outreach which has successfully grown both brand awareness and subscribers in the first half of the year.  The campaign is fronted by hapless and comedic duo Cupid and Fate who shirk their matchmaking responsibilities in exchange for useless, time-wasting pursuits like filling in magazine quizzes and doing their hair.

I went to see Tony Benn speak at the Festival Hall a week or so ago. Spurred on by the depth and range of his political insight and humour I’ve been reading some of his previous speeches and writing about Democracy, The EEC and Open Government. There’s an incredible amount of content that resonates as loudly today as it did when he was a Cabinet Minister in the 60’s and 70’s but there was one passage that struck a particular cord in the current climate. He himself is discussing the subject of energy (this is a speech from the early 70’s) and our need to diversify our energy reliance away from “multinationals controlled mainly from America” but it is a quote he brings forward from Winston Churchill in June 1914 which shows that this issue is longstanding and show no sign of going away;

“We have experienced … a long steady squeeze by the oil trusts all over the world, and we have found process and freights raised steadily against us until we have been pressed to pay more than double what a few years before we were accustomed to pay.”

Just arrived in New York for the week with our creative agency and a couple of things of interest happening over here. Firstly, saw Bush on TV night doing a press meeting, the guy looked liked that creepy uncle that tries too hard to be funny and informed. He is neither. Unconvincing was not the word, when asked about the state of the economy he said “I’m not an economist” – whilst factually correct you’d want a bit more than that from the man steering the ship of the world’s economy. Perhaps a more telling story in the NY Times this morning was the agreed sale of Anheuser Busch, brewers of Budweiser to InBev of Belgium for $52bn. The are some fairly candid responses to this sale of one of America’s flagship businesses but my favourite was from Opal Henderson, St Louis “Why can’t those foreigners just stay at home and leave us what we have?”. Another guy interviewed on CNN when asked what he thought about “Bud” being bought by a company from Belgium replied, “what, Belgium in Germany?”. Excellent.

Last night was also the Baseball All Star Game at Yankee Stadium, it looked like a great event and I really like this idea of the best players picked by the fans coming together to play an exhibition game and celebrating ‘Hall of Fame’ players as well. I wonder why we don’t try this with the Premier League.

On Tuesday this week I was a speaker at the Revolution – Digital Futures Conference in London, I was "handpicked" according to the blurb which was neither uncomfortable or as nerve-wracking as it sounds. The title of my presentation was Customer Captivation & Creating Long Term Engagement (aka Falling in Love with your Clients). I attempted to set out the challenges of building a brand and demonstrate how the process is like falling in love – to build a trusted brand you must be engaging, capture imaginations and spark conversations that will hopefully make for a long term relationship. Critically you must speak to your customers (aka loved one), think about the problem you are solving for them (if you are’t solving a problem why would they want to pay for your services?), understand how cultural and biological norms may influence engagement with you brand and product and constantly question and reevaluate your approach. As one of my favourite books, The Cluetrain Manifesto says, “Markets are conversations” - openness, transparency and a direct dialogue encourages engagement and keeps the relationship alive This process will then inform your creative output, which will in turn be influenced by the multi-media approach I am recommending.

The file is going to be uploaded to The Revolution site in a few days for anyone that wants to take a look.

As if the world doesn't have enough neurotic disorders already (for me it all ended when I found out you can have a morbid fear of cheese - Turophobia) I discovered that the latest neurosis is the fear of being out of mobile phone contact - Nomophobia.  I was reading Philip Roth's novel Exit Ghost on the Tube home and through serendipity stumbled across this passage which summed up the question of how the world got so obsessed with mobile telephony and always being available.

"What had happened in these ten years for there to be suddenly so much to say - so much pressing that it couldn't wait to be said? Everywhere I walked, somebody was approaching me talking on a phone and someone was behind me talking on a phone. Inside the cars, the drivers where on the phone. When I took a taxi, the cabbie was on the phone ..... I had to wonder what that had previously held them up had collapsed in people to make incessant talking into a telephone preferrable to walking about under no one's surveillance, momentarilly solitary, assimilating the streets through one's animal senses and thinking the myriad thoughts that the activities of a city inspire. For me it made the streets appear comic and the people ridiculous ....... What will the consequence be? You know you can reach the other person anytime, and if you can't, you get impatient - impatient and angry like a little stupid god."

I recently had the opportunity to sit on a panel at a Social Networking Conference organised by Oxford University's Internet Institute and Ofcom. According to Ofcom’s report on social networking almost one in five use these sites to introduce themselves to people they don’t know.

Although it must be said that social networking is helping to increase the accessibility and normality of online dating, it is a very different proposition to a bespoke matchmaking service. Social networking sites are designed to be exactly that – places for your existing social group to communicate easily and cheaply. They just aren’t geared up as a way to introduce yourself to strangers. With this in mind, its perhaps unsurprising that the research also suggests almost half of users have private profiles to ensure their information can only be viewed by existing friends.

In preparation for the conference I read a book by Yochai Benkler called The Wealth of Networks that discusses the use of networks and reaffirms the thinking above. His research shows that for the majority of people social networks predominantly serve as a reinforcement for 'strong ties' (people we have close relationships with) and not for creating realtionships based on 'weak ties'.  

The videos of every session, and of the Gala Dinner entertainers, are now available on YouTube. You can access them by visiting http://uk.youtube.com/user/eurozeitgeist08. The highlights for me are the conversations with Salman Rushdie and the team from www.askaninja.com

I’m currently attending the Google Partner Forum held at The Grove Hotel in Hertfordshire. The key note this morning was given by Gordon Brown, I read about this in the Times yesterday with some suspicion as they pointed out that perhaps this was a cynical alignment with the ‘Digital Industries’ and an attempt to update his somewhat ‘analog’ image but I came away from his speech not only impressed by his vision but also the glimpses of his humour and wit which the press usually comment on in absentia. (When asked if he had any advice for the adolescent Internet industry he recounted the saying that – “the first 500 years of any institution are always the most difficult” – also when commenting on his recent meetings with all three US Presidential candidates he commented that “all claim to have Irish ancestry”. Not exactly Oscar Wilde but certainly not the character depicted in the British press).

The main thrust of his comments where about the fact that we are in the middle of the “biggest period economic and cultural change since the industrial revolution”. For the UK he stated “the ultimate aim is to utilise all the innovation at our disposal to improve public services in this country and to give more power to those who use them”. More expansively he stated that we must embrace the opportunities presented by Globalisation without recourse to protectionist Government intervention. Mr. Brown claims he stands for an “open, flexible, free trade economy” and that we must not “lose site of the basic optimism where producers become consumers”.

Mr. Brown’s form of socialism calls for;

1. Free Trade
2. Greater flexibility in Markets (referring particularly to Oil and Food production)
3. More inclusiveness – (referring to helping people prepare and cope with change)
4. Global institutions that meet the challenges of changing times (“none of the Global institutions created in 1945 are working for the world of 2008”)
5. A Global Society which can “pursue the issues of Globalisation together”

Now I am aware within the space of 30 minutes there is a great deal that needs elaboration and clarification but to me it had the feel and idealism of the work of Anthony Crosland in ‘The Future of Socialism’. I was sat there thinking that it was perhaps a follow-on from the “Basic Socialist Aspirations” set out in 1956 (half remembered this morning but reproduced here thanks to a quick Google search that perfectly illustrates the utility of technology in forming of ideas);

“First, a protest against the material poverty and physical squalor which capitalism produced. Secondly, a wider concern for ‘social welfare’ … Thirdly, a belief in equality and the ‘classless society’, and especially a desire to give the worker his ‘just’ rights and a responsible status at work. Fourthly, a rejection of competitive antagonism and an ideal of fraternity and cooperation. Fifthly, a protest against the inefficiences of capitalism as an economic system, and notably its tendency to mass unemployment”

I was still thinking through Mr. Brown’s comments when the next topics were introduced - “Technology as an enabler in India and Africa” and “Technology as a tool for cross cultural connectivity” (a speech given by Queen Rania of Jordan). It couldn’t be any more apparent that the challenges set out previously and Crosland’s “Aspirations” are current and pressing. At the heart of both of these discussions was the place of technology and communications networks to enable change of every kind. As Queen Rania said, the use of technology must “help raise consciousness and build a bridge between perception and trust”.  I came away from these speeches reminded why for me that the use technology and the Internet in particular offers an optimism and opportunity that is unprecedented in our lifetime.

2008 seems set to be the year that the popularity of online dating makes it truly mainstream. Over the past couple of months, we’ve seen coverage of online dating and match.com on high profile programmes including Sky News and Working Lunch and, continuing this trend, I was recently interviewed for Reuters TV.  It’s a big step forward to be hitting these news agendas but it’s also a reflection of the fact our industry touches on so many issues that everyone can relate to.

It was great to hear from one of our match marriages, Andreas and Jane, for the Reuters TV piece. Having chatted with them, they feel that the social perception of online dating has significantly altered since they met in 2002. Apparently, no one bats an eyelid at their ‘love on the net’ story anymore which, perhaps more than anything, indicates how commonplace online dating is becoming.