Last week I was in NYC visiting with Hanft Raboy Partners (our creative agency) www.hanftraboy.com  to (a) meet the team and (b) discuss the historical brand strategy an d future initiatives. Adam (Hanft) and Doug (Raboy) have created a really smart team that impressed me over the two days with their insight and understanding of the dating market and clear ability to generate exciting and new ideas to take us through the next 12 months. I also took the opportunity to get down to for the day to be present when the announcement was made internally that our new CEO will be Thomas Enraght Mooney. (the current CEO) is taking a new role at IAC (our parent company) and Thomas (the current COO) will be taking over the reins. Overall is appeared that people internally had anticipated and are unconcerned about the change.  People know Thomas well and feel that the transition will be seamless and successful. On a personal note I think this is positive news for the business, Thomas was brought up in the , went to University in and did his MBA in . So he has a detailed insight and understanding of the European markets. Importantly he totally understands the nuances that set us apart from the business.

On another (but not unrelated) note there was a good article in The Times last week with Marc Simoncini the CEO of our French competitor Meetic. Marc offers some interesting observations about the market overall and their recent acquisition of the based dating agency Dating Direct. I thought his most significant comment was that;

“There are only two philosophies in this business,” Mr Simoncini, 43, said. “The American philosophy and the French one. The Americans try to sell you love. We sell une rencontre [an encounter] and I don’t care what happens afterwards.”

I thought the comments are misguided in a couple of ways. Firstly it makes the assumption that US companies have a generic philosophy and apply that approach without and local consultation to their European businesses. This certainly doesn’t apply here at Match.com. Although our parent company is US based we have strong representation in all of the key European countries and as a consequence understand the cultural differences between each market.  Secondly, he makes a comment that US companies position themselves “to sell you love”. Well, we make no apologies for this and do think this is what our customers are looking for. Unlike our French counterparts we want to ‘Make Love Happen’ and not just facilitate casual relationships. After all there is any number of other websites further down the moral spectrum that can serve this purpose.

Cultural differences clearly have a part to play by market when making these sorts of observations. I thought there was a lot of interesting debate around this a couple of years ago when the CEO of US company Boeing was sacked when it was discovered that he was, unbeknownst to his wife, having an affair with a colleague. The cultural divide was perhaps illustrated best in the editorial of one newspaper which commented ““Had he been an Airbus executive, the French would have given him a raise”.  Maybe we do see things differently. C’est la Vie.