In 2011, Shahzad Younas was a young, single banker living in London, but dating was proving difficult; as a Muslim man, he was struggling to find potential partners with a similar religious background. He decided to start a side business, muzmatch, a dating service for those of the Muslim faith, according to Sim Ahmed, the company’s CMO.
Since its founding, muzmatch has evolved into Muzz, and has brought together more than 400,000 couples in marriage, according to PR Manager Sofie Ahmed. Muzz has 8 million members, its site says.
Muzz’s marketing strategy includes ads in New York City subway stations and trains. The company began advertising in the subway in November 2021, with its latest set of ads running in December last year.
Other dating apps, including Tinder, are taking advantage of the NYC subway system’s rising ridership levels and extensive ad space. The campaigns are running at a time when ridership levels have been climbing back up after taking a hit from the pandemic, with data from the city comptroller showing that ridership in February was back to 67% of its 2019 level during the same month.
“Toward the end of 2021 into 2022, ridership trended upwards as people started going back to the office two, three days a week,” Brian Rappaport, founder and CEO of out-of-home agency Quan Media Group, told us. “Subway advertising is back almost to pre-pandemic levels.”
Muzz’s subway ads feature jokes intended to resonate with Muslims: One ad states, “Prefer biryani to Big Macs? You need Muzz.” Another reads, “We’ll say we met at the mosque.”
Muzz
Ahmed said everything about the ads—from design to copy—is crafted with its audience in mind. The brand typically uses copy that speaks to Muslim sensibility, as well as humor that plays on cultural stereotypes by taking ownership over them, he said.
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Muzz used information like census data to help target its advertising, locating Muslim communities within New York City and placing ads in subway stations near those areas.
He said Muzz’s biggest campaigns ideally lead to people seeing an ad “in the real world,” snapping a photo, and talking about it with their friends.
“We’re coming to this pendulum swing away from digital. People are tired of endlessly scrolling,” he said. “Offline is coming back in a lot of ways. People are scrambling to come to our real-world events.”
On the other hand, Tinder has been using subway ads to cater to a wider consumer base. The company began its first subway campaign in March of this year, which can be seen in stations like Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn and Union Square in Manhattan, according to Tinder SVP of Global Marketing Stephanie Danzi.
The campaign, dubbed “It Starts With a Swipe,” features diverse couples with taglines such as “a toothbrush at their place” and “someone to go to heaven with.”
Danzi said out-of-home transit such as the subway offers advertising opportunities that can engage potential new Tinder users—the Gen Z consumer base the brand is courting—with multiple ads at once. Subway riders a captive audience that can see multiple pieces of Tinder’s campaign at once, she explained.
Despite the benefits both Muzz and Tinder claim come with subway advertising, Ahmed said Muzz approaches it as just another medium the company can use to build brand awareness.
Overall, he said Muzz treats all marketing, including subway advertising, like an experiment, noting that success hinges on the copy and saturation of the brand in a certain geographic area.