Grindr is adding a tennis buzz to its dating game.
To celebrate the US Open, NYC-based Grindr, the world’s largest gay dating app, changed its notification sound – until the end of September users hear a snort every time a potential suitor sends them a “tap” to show they are interested.
The campaign, called “Serving Grunt,” was explained to the app’s 14 million users with the note, “The open season is upon us and this year, we’re serving grunt on (and off) the field.”
“We just heard the term ‘serve and moan’ and we were sold,” Tristan Pineiro, Grindr’s senior vice president of marketing and brand communications, told The Post.
“And tennis is a very gay sport. There’s the white shorts, here’s the grunts, here’s the ball boys.”
When singles on Grindr get a match, they usually hear a “bloop.”
Some users of the app were put off by the new sound.
“I put my phone down for a few minutes and then all of a sudden I heard a man’s voice, almost like a moan or groan, and I immediately thought someone had broken into my apartment,” said Rehman Bhatti, 32, of Chicago.
Grindr user Wyatt Stanley, 21, from Michigan, said: “The grunt freaked me out at first because I wasn’t even sure if it was coming from my phone.
“I think it’s really funny and I’m sure it brought a lot of attention to the US Open from confused Grindr users.”
The idea to imitate the noise of tennis, which Pineiro said “can be quite sexual but also funny,” came from a creative agency. The change is unrelated to the Flushing, Queens tournament — the final major of the tennis season — which ends Sunday.
With this campaign, Grindr is taking a stab at changing the stigma around heterosexual-only sports, as more than 100,000 of its users list tennis as an interest in their profiles.
“There’s a kind of whimsical nature around the sport and that was something we just wanted to tap into,” Pineiro said. “A lot of gay people are big sports fans.”
At this year’s US Open, the only gay players were women.
“At the moment, there are no male tennis players,” Pineiro said. “And we just think that’s a little weird.”
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Image Source : nypost.com