Grindr is betting big on IRL marketing. There’s a very digital reason.

Grindr is shifting its marketing into the material world.

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Grindr became one of the world's best-known dating brands by helping men meet each other using their phones.

Its marketing dollars, on the other hand, are increasingly being deployed in the real world.

Grindr CMO Tristan Pineiro told me that there are two pertinent — and digital — business reasons he's betting big on IRL.

The photos and videos that people organically share when they're enjoying an event can travel further on social media than the brand's own posts.

Then there's a quirk of Grindr's advertising business: Many brands are still wary of placing their ads inside a gay hook-up app .

"There is a lot of nervousness about it, with the whole rollback of DEI, a lot of brands have felt emboldened to say, 'Oh well, we don't need to bother anymore,'" Pineiro said.

"There are brands we do work with that stuck with us, and there are others that have disappeared, or say the budget just isn't there anymore." Getting into the IRL groove Grindr joins brands like language-learning app Duolingo , home-improvement retailer Lowe's , and AI company Anthropic , which have all been upping their experiential game in recent months.

As big monoculture media moments dwindle and social feeds become ever more personalized, marketers are turning to events and pop-ups to build brand affinity and loyalty.

There's another incentive to create experiences people want to talk about.

A Brandwatch study published last year, analyzing more than 900 million online mentions, found that brand-owned accounts initiate fewer than 1% of posts about their own brands on X.

For CMOs chasing social reach , increasingly, it pays to give people a reason to grab their phones.