Los Angeles late at night during COVID lockdowns was weird. I lived just off Sunset Boulevard, down from Dialogue Cafe, so everything still looked picture-perfect, but it was so quiet. The palm trees swayed, the neon signs still buzzed like bees, and an occasional car still whipped down the street, but there was an eerie silence that didn't exist before that.
For the past few weeks I’d been working on a campaign for Tinder called ‘Put Yourself Out There.’ Very ironic for COVID, I know. The idea was that people would clean up their Tinder profiles, screenshot them, and we would blast them out into the world on billboards in New York, LA, and Vancouver.
Tinder bios are their own form of literature where everyone is wearing a mask. Where bios are pretending to be funny, or someone is pretending to be honest. Everyone is looking for connection to escape the deep loneliness of the real world, and that was particularly apparent during COVID.
The campaign went live while LA was under a shelter-in-place order, and everyone was staying inside. It was particularly odd on Sunset, where the normally busy street was quiet, and the billboard ad buy was playing to a mostly quiet road.
Regardless, that night I wanted to walk up to the top of the street and admire the work I’d put in, take in the Tinder campaign with my own eyes. I hiked to the top of the road, stood in front of the digital billboard for a few minutes, and finally saw the first profile flash in front of me.
Some guy dressed as a king, blown up to the size of a small building, his Tinder bio floating above the street on Sunset Boulevard. It hit me in a way I didn’t really expect. It wasn't pride or joy; it was a kind of quiet relief. Kinda like there was physical proof out in the real world that something I had made on my laptop had entered the world, even when nobody was really allowed to enter the real world.
Advertising is always kinda like that. You can spend weeks building something that is meant to exist in public, and when it goes live, it just kinda disappears into the scenery. It becomes wallpaper; it just dissolves as background noise.
But that night, alone at the top of Sunset Boulevard, I experienced it, fully alone. It was the perfect metaphor for the times, for my career, for the world that would keep moving (eventually).
Between you and me, this was a career-defining moment for me. Mostly because it was tangible, because I could see it with my own eyes and not just through an Instagram Reel. It didn't feel flattened out or muted; it existed in the real world, and even if I was the only one who saw it that night, it was real.
If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.
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Photo Credit: Steven Pahel
Love that the campaign was called Put Yourself Out There during covid. The irony.