Dublin agency wins UK award for igniting Tinder with awareness campaign

Hot on the heels of picking up a Bell award at the ICADs, Dublin agency Eightytwenty won the not-for-profits award and a bronze at the Warc Prize for Social Strategy in London last week.

It was the only Irish award winner, and one of only of five European entries to be recognised. Other winners included Droga5 for Heineken, Wieden+Kennedy for Three UK, AMV BBDO for PepsiCo and the US navy with its Project Architeuthis campaign.

Eightytwenty won for its campaign for the Irish Immigrant Council, which used the Tinder dating app in an entirely unexpected and unusual way.

"It was a bit of a hack," says Eightytwenty client partner executive Cathal Gillen.

The agency created 17 false profiles of women – without Tinder knowing and with images posed by models – and engaged with thousands of men on the app.

When the men “swiped” back they found out more about the women – the agency working with its client had created stories for each that were typical of women trafficked into the sex industry.

The profiles lasted on Tinder for nearly three weeks before being taken down last December and in that time garnered media publicity – the hook being the innovative, daring use of the dating app – for the issue of sex trafficking as far away as New Zealand.

“We haven’t tracked all the publicity. There would be TV coverage that we probably missed, but we calculate that we gained €1.5 million in earned media,” says Gillen.

Not bad for a campaign where the media cost to the client – uploading to Tinder – was zero.

“It is great to see our work get recognised on a global scale. It’s also brilliant to see the strategic element of the campaign receive recognition as, although in hindsight it seems a relatively straightforward activation, the contribution of social, PR and tech were critical to the campaign success,” says Gillen.