Grindr is adding tennis grunts to its dating game.
To celebrate the New York-based US Open, Grindr, the world's biggest gay dating app, has changed the sound of its notifications – until the end of September, users will hear a grunt whenever a potential suitor sends them a “tap” to indicate they're interested.
The campaign, called “Serving Grunt,” was explained to the app's 14 million users with the note, “Open season is upon us and this year, we're serving grunt on (and off) the court.”
“We heard the term ‘serve and grunt,’ and we went crazy,” Tristan Pinero, Grindr’s senior vice president of brand marketing and communications, told the Post.
“And tennis is a very gay sport. It's got little white shorts, it's got grunts, it's got ball boys.”
When singles on Grindr find a match, they usually hear “Bloop.”
Some app users were taken aback by the new sound.
“I turned off my phone for a couple of minutes and then all of a sudden I heard a man's voice, almost like moaning or grunting, and I immediately thought someone broke into my apartment,” said Rehman Bhatti, 32, of Chicago.
“The sound scared me at first because I wasn't even sure it came from my phone,” said Grindr user Wyatt Stanley, a 21-year-old from Michigan.
“I think it's really funny and I'm sure it will have drawn a lot of attention to the US Open from confused Grindr users.”
The idea to mimic the tennis grunt, which Pinero said “can be quite sexual, but also fun,” came from a creative agency. The change is not associated with the Flushing, Queens, tournament — the final major of the tennis season — which ends Sunday.
With this campaign, Grindr is taking a step towards changing the stigma that sports are only for heterosexuals, as over 100,000 of its users have listed tennis as an interest in their profiles.
“There's a kind of brotherly spirit to sports, and that's just what we wanted to show,” Pinero said. “A lot of gay people are big sports fans.”
At this year's US Open, the only Gay players were women,
“There are no male tennis players in the field at the moment,” Pinero said. “And we think that's a bit strange.”
