Dating apps are a hard sell. This one worked.

Candidly, this was a hard one

Candidly, a dating app is one of the hardest brand deals in creator marketing. Most creators don’t want to promote one. It’s personal, it can feel awkward in front of their audience, and a lot of them turned us down before we’d finished the pitch.

The content is hard too. Dating is a tricky subject to make funny or relatable without it reading like an ad.

We’ve worked on hundreds of brand deals, and this was one of the most challenging. It’s also one we’re proudest of, because it forced us to change how we work.

The brief

Yuzu is a dating and social app built for Asian communities. It needed creators who genuinely belonged to that community, across the US and Canada, from micro to macro audiences.

It also wasn’t a one-off. The campaign ran across multiple quarters, so we needed creators who would say yes, and keep saying yes.

It forced us to get creative

The usual playbook of finding creators with the right audience, sending a brief and approving the post wasn’t going to work here. A straight product mention for a dating app falls flat, and most creators wouldn’t agree to one anyway.

So we changed the angle and leaned into skits: short scenes built around dating situations people recognize, with the app playing a natural part. A skit gives the creator something they’d want to post anyway, and it gives the viewer a reason to watch to the end.

Finding the creators was even harder

We needed people who were part of the community Yuzu serves, whose audiences sat in the US and Canada, who could carry a skit, and who were willing to put a dating app in front of their followers. Very few creators check all four boxes.

This is where our technology does the heavy lifting. Instead of scrolling feeds, we screen creators by where their audience is, who it is, how their recent posts have actually performed and what kind of content they already make, then pitch only the ones worth pitching. It’s how we found creators like @angelina.zhq and @jumybear, and built a roster of smaller and larger creators who all spoke to the same audience.

• Plan the budget and campaign around the intended community.
• Source and screen creators across the US and Canada.
• Handle contracts and negotiations.
• Coordinate activations and delivery across multiple quarters.

What it added up to

More than 10 million views across 121 deliverables and 90+ activations, sustained over multiple quarters in the US and Canada.

In a category most creators avoid, keeping that many creators on board, quarter after quarter, was the real win.

What we’d tell anyone in a hard category

Hard categories reward teams that change their approach, not teams that push harder on the usual one. Expect more creators to say no. Give the ones who say yes a format they actually enjoy making. And take the search seriously. In a category like this, choosing the creators is the strategy.