San Francisco Man Turns To Facebook Ad To Line Up Virtual Dates During COVID-19 Lockdown
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) -- A San Francisco man tired of dating apps decided to cut through the noise by buying Facebook ads to market himself.
"Hey what's up, I'm looking for a girlfriend," said David Wu in the 22-second ad. "But since I'm sick of dating apps, I thought it would be a hilarious idea to pay for Facebook ads to find one."
After two weeks, the 28-year-old received more than 60 applications from prospects who saw his targeted ad.
Wu runs the YouTube channel RiffShop with 138,000 subscribers. It's a business that teaches people how to do heavy metal screaming. The self-proclaimed marketing geek saw ways to optimize his chances at finding a life partner by getting personal.
"The dating game is very much like marketing, where the job of a marketer is not to sell your product or service to everybody in the world. It's to zero in and focus on the most likely to convert or the people who are most interested in your product," said Wu.
So he did just that. He narrowed down the pool of prospects by targeting women between 21 and 35, focusing on fans of the wildly popular K-pop group BTS. They also shared his baseline level of interests: anime, entrepreneurship, and heavy metal.
"Because I put so much thought and was so vulnerable with myself, instead of the typical one-liners that you'd expect to receive on a dating app, I'd have people submitting sometimes multiple paragraphs sometimes about themselves, pitching themselves," Wu said.
Wu's ad sends applicants to a website to answer questions so he can get to know them better. He says the result has been a handful of high quality virtual dates.
It's something Wu says he would be open to doing after the shelter-in-place order is lifted.
"With video chats, it's very quick, you can just decide right away whether or not you want to continue forward," he said.
Wu says the total cost for the ads came out to about $250.
