The world of Internet dating can be a cold, unforgiving place - and that's just the battle between Web sites for customers.
The online dating service Chemistry.com plans to unleash a new campaign that seeks to depict its older and larger competitor, eHarmony.com, as out of touch with mainstream American values. The ads, which will appear in weekly newspapers and magazines in the United States starting Monday, attack eHarmony for refusing to match up people of the same gender and for the evangelical Christian beliefs of its founder, Dr. Neil Clark Warren.
It is not the first time that Chemistry.com has hit on this theme. In April, the service ran a set of ads called ''Rejected by eHarmony'' featuring people who were turned away from eHarmony for being gay, not happy enough or simply unmatchable by their system. Chemistry.com spent $20 million for that campaign in the second half of the year, and plans to increase the budget for this new effort.
Although Chemistry.com has only 3.7 million registered users compared with eHarmony's 17 million, the ''Rejected by eHarmony'' campaign has apparently worked: Since it was introduced, Chemistry.com has experienced an 80 percent growth rate, said Mandy Ginsburg, general manager of Chemistry.com. She said that gay and lesbian people made up about 10 percent of the site's membership.
Chemistry.com, an offshoot of IAC/InterActiveCorp's Match.com, follows eHarmony's practice of putting users through an in-depth personality test in order to generate potential matches. Other online dating sites, like Match or Yahoo! Personals, allow users to post pictures and profiles of themselves in order to make their own connections.
Still, eHarmony says that the two companies are not in the same line of work. ''Chemistry.com and eHarmony are fundamentally different companies,'' said Jodi Petrie, an eHarmony spokeswoman. ''We focus on helping people find successful long-term relationships. We don't consider ourselves a casual dating site.''
EHarmony, based in Pasadena, California and founded in 2000 by Warren, a clinical psychologist, has been criticized for refusing to provide same-sex matches. The service also turns away applicants who are married or have been divorced too many times. Warren, a former seminary student who has had several books published by the evangelical Christian group Focus on the Family, has publicly voiced his belief that premarital sex can increase one's likelihood of marrying the wrong person.
Petrie said that eHarmony took no position on premarital sex and had no affiliation with any religion. She also articulated its reason for not offering services for gays or lesbians. ''EHarmony's matching system is based on psychological data collected from heterosexual married couples, and we have not offered a service for those seeking same-sex matches,'' she said. ''Nothing precludes us from offering a same-sex service in the future, but it's not a service we offer now.''
Nonetheless, Chemistry.com, founded two years ago, is banking that consumers will agree with its disapproval of eHarmony and prefer to associate with a brand that they feel more closely reflects their own values. The campaign imagines a world in which eHarmony's values - as interpreted by Chemistry.com - were enforced in various ways. For example, one ad shows a sign on a beach that reads ''No gays on beach, May-September,'' while another features a motel sign declaring, ''No premarital sex.'' The copy in both ads goes on to assure readers that Chemistry.com does not judge or enforce a moral code on members.
The ads ''demonstrate that eHarmony is out of sync with what is happening in America,'' Ginsburg said. The campaign will expand to include television and more print ads in January.
The ads were developed by Hanft, Raboy and Partners, an independent agency based in New York. ''The idea behind the campaign is to globalize eHarmony's practices, and ask, 'What would it mean if America had to live by those rules?' '' said Adam Hanft, the agency's founder and chief executive.
Competition for customers in the online matchmaking business, which generates $600 million in annual sales, has heightened. Revenue growth has slowed from more than 70 percent a year to 10 percent in 2006, and is projected to grow just 8 percent annually until 2011, according to Jupiter Research, an Internet consultancy.
Source: http://www.contentagenda.com/articleXml/LN720917157?nid=3040
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