Hinge CMO Jackie Jantos hopes to help make Gen Zers less lonely

Summary

Dating apps have developed a bad reputation lately. People ghost others, which means they simply stop responding to someone they once shared frequent correspondence with. There appear to be slim pickings, despite living in big cities like New York. And did we mention a lot of these apps now cost money? At the inaugural SXSW London, TechCrunch caught up with Jackie Jantos, the CMO and president of Hinge, to talk about how the company is marketing itself to a new generation in what has become a listless dating scene. “This is a generation that has grown up with a deep understanding of how digital experiences are created and what they are trying to get out of them,” Jantos said in an interview with TechCrunch. She listed the traits Gen Zers want most out of their brands, like transparency and authenticity. It’s a diverse generation that spends less time in person than its predecessors. “If you’re not building with inclusion at the center of everything, you’re just not going to build a meaningful product or marketing activation to engage them,” she said. The dating app landscape has evolved over the past few years, seeing companies like Hinge working overtime to try to attract and sustain user attention. Tinder, for example, has struggled with growth in the past few years, culminating in its CEO stepping down a few weeks ago. Bumble is also seeing a slowdown in user growth. Hinge and Tinder are both owned by Match Group. The Q1 2025 report released by Match Group shows that Hinge is faring a bit better than its sister company. The report showed that Hinge saw an increase in direct revenue, compared to Tinder, and that the app’s downloads were “strong” across the English-speaking and Western European markets. Jantos said Hinge is implementing and toying around with numerous new features at the moment. For example, it has added a quota on how many chats one person can have at one time so that a user isn’t simply “collecting chats.” “We want to encourage people to close ou...