Ep. 221 with Tamika Young, CMO, Hinge

In December 2014, I matched with a guy on Hinge that I had 19 mutual friends with. Back then, Hinge was built on matching you off of your Facebook network. They only matched you with friends of friends, so there was some built-in reassurance that whoever you were meeting wasn’t a total stranger. We got drinks, and we had a great time. We kissed, said our goodbyes, and went on our way. We tried to meet up again, but our schedules never lined up. There was an entire saga when he accused me of faking watching my friend’s 5-year-old to avoid seeing him, which for the record, I was not doing. A couple of weeks went by, and we just stopped trying. Four months later, on a total whim, I texted him to see if that dinner offer still stood. Shockingly, he said yes. (Turns out we'd both still been seeing other people the night we met, so maybe some space is all you need.) I married that guy in 2019. We had our daughter in 2021. We laugh at it now, looking back, but if I’m being honest, somewhere in the middle of the silence, the vetting and the wrongful babysitting accusation, I was pretty skeptical it would go anywhere. That's the emotional territory Hinge is leaning into with its new campaign, "I Can't Believe We Met on Hinge." It's not the tidy, love-at-first-sight version of the story. It's the version where you’re tired from dating, you’re half-convinced to delete the app, but still, somehow, hold onto hope. It’s real couples, real footage, real names. It’s the truth of what dating actually feels like when it finally works out. In this week’s Brand Insider 1:1, we sat down with CMO Tamika Young to hear more.