FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Contact: Megan Arendt
Office: 202-659-4310
Email: arendtm@ash.org
Tinder Experiment Tests if Smoking is Hot
Would you date a smoker? How about give them a right swipe?
Action on Smoking & Health (ASH) has partnered with two New York creatives, Angelle Juneau and Jeff Scardino, to create a Tinder experiment called Smoking Hot. The social experiment uses the #1 dating app to see if smoking is attractive to potential dates.
Recent studies have indicated that although smoking in down among high school students, the age group with the highest rate is the 18 to 26 year-old crowd. Both cigar smoking and social smoking have contributed to the high rate.
The trouble with getting this age group to stop smoking is that they don’t think about their own mortality. They don’t believe smoking with kill them. When asked, almost all of them will tell you that they plan on quitting in the future. So threats of death do not work. A different approach was needed to hit home and make quitting relevant in their current lives. So, we set out to show them that their dating life could be affected by smoking.
Matches created on Tinder are based solely on looks. So it was the perfect platform to test if people think smoking is attractive. Smoking Hot takes one beautiful girl and creates two separate Tinder accounts. Both accounts have the same settings, likes, friends, and almost exactly the same photos. The only difference is that one account features the girl smoking in every photo while the other does not. Over the course of one week, the first 1,000 guys were swiped right – or liked as potential dates – for each account. The non-smoking account received 54% matches while the smoking account received 29%.
The project lives on ash.org/smokinghot and consists of targeted online and social ads, along with posters that will be hung outside of bars and on college campuses. There is also a live poll component where anyone can give their opinion by casting a vote in favor of dating a smoker, nonsmoker, or both.
Further experiments are in the works to test both a straight man and a gay man.
Project video:
Lives here:
CREDITS:
Organization: Action on Smoking and Health (ASH)
Clients: Megan Arendt & Nichelle Gray
Creators: Angelle Juneau & Jeff Scardino
Music: Lullatone
