PRNEWSWIRE — Apr 4 — Carat Interactive announced a new interactive online ad campaign for PerfectMatch.com titled "Genuine People, Real Love," building on the existing member base of over 1.5 million users and momentum created through the Dr. Phil show feature on February 11. "Using the 'love letters' in the ads gives us a strong visual device, which further distinguishes the brand," said Tamara Birdsall, VP/Creative Director at Carat. "We'd love to see the letters take on a life of their own, because they say so much about the importance that PerfectMatch.com places on the individual. The new theme speaks to both the sincerity and motivations of PerfectMatch.com members and the idea that PerfectMatch.com holds the promise of the sort of relationship people dream about — one with permanence, reliability, romance, and mutual acceptance," The online advertising campaign began on April 1st and will run on sites including MSN, LifetimeTV.com, MSNBC, Netzero, eDiets and EarthLink.
Mark Brooks: Upstart Perfect Match is becoming a very serious contender as a relationships focused online personals site.
PerfectMatch.com is enjoying the benefits of offline advertising. eHarmony.com and Match.com are also doing an incredible job of creating an offline presence.
The next wave of online daters are going to come from offline sources, so it’s only natural that the companies who are doing the highest level of Offline( TV and or Print) are also the ones with an influx of paying members.
Mary
Editor-in-Chief
One2One Magazine
The strong offline presence of select online dating sites certainly benefits the entire industry and even companies other than those doing the advertising. So, I say keep it up!
However, like eHarmony, I am very disappointed that Perfectmatch does not offer any scientific evidence for their “Duet matching system.” Consumers and media alike are beginning to ask questions about the science/research behind such tests…and with good reason. The controversial weAttract industry report echoed these very concerns — as have a few newspaper reports. Specifically, if a company advertises that it uses “scientific matching” it should take steps to clearly demonstrate it.
“Thirty years of research” behind the PerfectMatch test is not very descriptive and says nothing about the technical quality of PerfectMatch’s test or its validity in predicting relationship quality. To be sure, many historical finidngs in the relationship science field need revisiting, because the research was almost entirely based on Classical Test Theory. This approach has been outdated since 1960. Modern educational and psychological tests that have real world implications for the test takers are now based in more sophisticated statistics called Item Response Theory. This approach can also do something Classical Test Theory cannot — detect and take into account test biases related to age, gender, and sexual orientation.
If a test does not address potential response biases, then one should not trust (much less act upon) the results of that test. All of these issues are addressed in my co-authored article recently published in the North American Journal of Psychology (Houran et al., 2004). To my knowledge, TRUE.com’s TRUE Compatibility Test is the only online compatibility test (i) independently certified to meet professional testing standards, (ii) published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, and (iii) grounded in Item Response Theory (see Lange et al., 2005: http://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/2005/True.htm).
Reference
Houran, J., Lange, R., Rentfrow, P. J., & Bruckner, K. H. (2004). Do online matchmaking tests work? An assessment of preliminary evidence for a publicized ‘predictive model of marital success.’ North American Journal of Psychology, 6, 507-526.
Thanks,
James Houran, Ph.D.
Chief Psychologist, TRUE.com