JakeDate.com Nails App Marketing, Reminds Us That Tech is Boring
The latest in dating is here: JakeDate, an app that allows you to finally connect – with Jake.
JakeDate.com, created by the GroupThink Group, is a parody of both dating apps and the over designed marketing sites that announce new technologies. The site itself is glossy and attractive, complete with fake reviews from top tech sites and bios (including job titles like “Head of Swipe”) for the whole JakeDate team. The ultimate goal of JakeDate is to connect users with one man: 29-year-old Jacob Kleinfeldt of Waukegan, IL, who promotional materials brag is “perfectly harmless.” The app has an elaborate interface: direct-to-Jake messaging, integrated social and ecommerce channels (you can connect to Jake on GoodReads and buy his leather goods on Etsy!), multi-platform capabilities, an algorithm designed rate your compatibility, and swiping – all for the love of one man. It’s like The Bachelor, but for everyone, and on your phone, and not real.
The JakeDate project is funny and sly, weird in great places and well executed. And spending too long looking at it bums me out.
This might be the correct response to what is being commented on: app marketing. App landing pages have become their own genre of meaningless web content. Sites are so slickly designed and promotional language is so full of techy double speak that the product is irrelevant. Actual engagement (as opposed to “social” or “user” or “B2B”) with these pages is impossible, because everything is form over content and logic is secondary. Why would I want to connect with your new farm-to-table restaurant review locator app on Pinterest? Why would anyone need to use your rickshaw-hailing app on their television? And how have I read your whole site but still don’t understand why I would want an app that can make uncannily accurate bleating goat noises?
There is something uniquely alienating about looking at this kind of parody website. This is not, of course, the first: Arrested Development hammered app marketing with their Fakeblock landing page and Silicon Valley’s Pied Piper came to lifeless life online. But more than parody apps or satiric videos about online dating sites or the beautiful haven that is ClickHole, app marketing jokes feel empty, because there’s nothing there to point to. This hollow thing is hollow.
The amount of effort that goes into making these fake websites makes me anxious. Breaking down the intricacies of why marketing speak is funny requires more attention than churning out pat copy does. The team behind JakeDate realizes how funny it is to brag that their one man dating app includes swiping, but actual marketing sites boast about unnecessary features with zero irony. It is funny, yes, but it’s depressing and resigning as well. Parodying something that is a parody of itself feels a little like banging your head on a wall of HTML code. Reading through JakeDate, even while giggling about how Jake sometimes believes in ghosts, amplifies the sense that we are trapped inside these meaningless strictures of these sites – that it would be impossible to talk about something really revolutionary. So much of Silicon Valley’s “disruption” looks the same, for the same unexamined reasons; I wish the people who bother to scrutinize the tech world were creating something new instead.
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