FRANK NOTES: OkCupid Through the Wieden+Kennedy Looking Glass

In continuing to indulge the impulse to talk about creative content and campaigns we love here at Frank, we thought to write about the visual saturation and playful copy of Wieden+Kennedy’s wildly popular 2018 OkCupid campaign. Thanks to Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, creators of Toiletpaper Magazine, the design serves up a kind of electric palette cleanser, Campari with a spritzy twist of LSD. Each joyous ad bursts into our field of vision with a pulsing graphic surrealism that is at once optimistic and smart, a tricky combination not seen or heard since Obama ’08, when hope was no longer just for suckers. The ads broadcast a  mood not traditionally associated with dating—which, let’s be real—is sometimes delightful but really only funny, only fun to watch, when it fails harder, as they say in creative marketing circles, and can become fodder for stand-up and rom-coms.

But as wowed as we are by the ecstatic splash in the pool that is the OkCupid campaign, it’s not the witty images but the copy we want to address here. And not even the copy, per se, but what has been said about the copy, by the content creators themselves.

Like the phrase fail harder, the verb subvert is a popular way to talk about innovation. Cousin to disruptive, subvert implies a bold move, a maverick change in direction from the old guard, a total refresh. It’s meant to imply courage. It has the sexy, musky whiff of risk, but of also being on the right side of things, ultimately. But to subvert , definitively, is to upset, to pull down, to sabotage, to corrupt, to pervert. From the agency’s website page devoted to the OkCupid campaign:

We made OkCupid the champion of dating with depth, while also reflecting the issues and passions that our audience cares about, by creating a campaign that subverted a popular modern dating acronym “DTF.”

To be clear, the campaign and copy strategy are genius, in our humble opinion. But not because the acronym DTF or its meaning, “Down to F*ck,” is subverted. On the contrary. If anything, phrases such as “DTF-All HEAD OVER HEELS”— paired with a multi-handed beautiful person cradling another beautiful person clutching a long-stemmed rose—and “DTF-OCUS ON MY CHAKRAS”— blocked next to a bearded ginger in belted khakis and a bare torso serving as a magnet for a drawerful of kitchen utensils and tools, do the opposite of pervert—they take the hookup out of the closet, reframe the conversation, and hang it proudly on the crosstown billboard for all to celebrate. It’s a wink, not an erasure.

So, why use words like subvert when the result is not true subversion, but collaboration?  Here’s a thought: subvert itself comes from the arsenal of old-guard patriarchy, a dank language armory where rhetoric and persuasion become cynicism and manipulation, an us-against-them, who’s on top, who’s the smartest person in the room lexicon that wants to win more than it wants to play. From the agency’s site:

To reintroduce the OG dating platform OkCupid to a young audience, we redefined a dirty digital-dating acronym and turned it into an empowering rallying cry for modern romance.

It could be argued that that “dirty digital-dating acronym” does indeed subvert the cheeky nature of the acronym. Dirty, here, is pejorative, unseemly. Why not say, simply, digital-dating acronym? Does the copy actually transform hookup sex, or the desire for it, from dirty to wholesome with one (or several) deft and witty bit(s) of wordplay? It could be argued that the very existence of OkCupid represents a refusal of a young dating population to relegate their libidos to the back of the sock drawer, a paradigm shift that occurs, was occurring, well before this campaign.

As we see it, the campaign does an extraordinarily gorgeous job of supporting and celebrating humans being humans, the clean and the dirty of it. In this time of social distancing and isolation, it feels all the more necessary to celebrate our humanity, our sense of play, our hunger for one another, even if many of us cannot act upon the feelings. Looking behind the scenes of how a great creative content campaign comes into being, we wish the creators sounded as though they believed in it as much as we do.