Jackie Jantos’s promotion from CMO to CEO isn’t only a management change, it’s a press release about the place development now comes from. Revisiting her June dialog with The Drum reveals why advertising and marketing, product and tradition have develop into inseparable on the prime.
When Jackie Jantos appeared on The Drum Podcast in June, she wasn’t speaking like a chief advertising and marketing officer ready for permission to affect the enterprise. She was already speaking like a chief govt. This week, Match Group confirmed Jantos’ promotion to CEO of Hinge, following the exit of founder Justin McLeod.
On the time of the podcast recording, she was Hinge’s CMO and newly appointed president. In hindsight, the dialog now reads much less like a retrospective interview and extra like an early blueprint for the management mannequin Hinge has chosen to guess on. At a second when many manufacturers nonetheless debate whether or not advertising and marketing belongs on the prime desk, Hinge has answered decisively: development, tradition, product and model are the identical dialog.
From CMO to CEO with out altering the mindset
When Jantos took on the president function alongside her CMO remit, she described the shift not as a change of self-discipline, however of scope. “It has expanded, primarily giving me broader accountability for the expansion of the group, past simply the advertising and marketing work.”
That framing issues. There’s no try to distance herself from advertising and marketing, no suggestion that ‘actual’ management begins the place model ends. As an alternative, she positions advertising and marketing because the engine that already connects development, product and long-term relevance.
“While you have a look at the class that we’re in, the connection enterprise, it is rather a lot related to folks and to tradition,” she stated. “CMOs are accountable for folks and tradition and ensuring what you are promoting, product and repair is deeply related now and sooner or later.”
In different phrases, this isn’t a marketer studying to be a CEO, it’s a CEO who realized the enterprise by advertising and marketing first.
Advertising as product technique, not promotion
Jantos repeatedly returns to the concept that advertising and marketing isn’t downstream of product, however upstream of innovation. “A whole lot of the work that I’ve accomplished within the advertising and marketing capability has pulled ahead the insights which might be significantly related in our class.”
These insights into how folks behave, what they concern, what they need and what holds them again feed instantly into product choices. “We’ve had an outsized influence in supporting product innovation and the place the product goes.”
That is the place the CMO-to-CEO shift turns into instructive for the broader business. Jantos isn’t describing advertising and marketing as storytelling concerning the product; she’s describing it as a system for understanding human outcomes and designing in direction of them.
‘Designed to Be Deleted’ is a enterprise philosophy
Nowhere is that clearer than in Hinge’s most well-known positioning. “Individuals would possibly see it as a tagline, however truly that’s a philosophy that drives how we design our product and the way we design the entire advertising and marketing.”
That philosophy is unusually blunt for a subscription-based enterprise. “At its core, we’re designing for an consequence and that consequence is a superb date.”
The end result isn’t engagement, time spent or retention curves. It’s an ending and a profitable one. That creates pressure with typical subscription logic – one thing Jantos addressed head-on. “Our enterprise mannequin additionally depends on natural development. We’d like phrase of mouth and we have to work as a product.”
Development, on this mannequin, comes not from preserving customers contained in the system indefinitely, however from delivering on the promise so successfully that folks advocate for it as soon as they depart. “We’ve got an incredible quantity of {couples} who meet on Hinge. We inform their tales so much… and due to that storytelling, we develop.”
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Why Hinge protects the free expertise
One other sign of how deeply this considering runs: Hinge’s remedy of its free product. “Our free product has way more customers and it’s sacred.”
For Jantos, accessibility isn’t a advertising and marketing line it’s a development precept. “We wish love and relationships to be accessible to everybody, so we focus totally on the free product.”
That is additionally why Hinge has resisted promoting, at the same time as different platforms seek for incremental income. “For us, adverts are interference alongside that journey.”
The expertise is optimized round a single consequence: serving to folks transfer from digital interplay to real-world connection.
Gen Z, loneliness and management accountability
Jantos’s promotion additionally lands amid a wider reckoning about know-how’s function in loneliness, significantly for Gen Z. “Gen Z at present spend 1,000 hours much less time within the firm of one other individual.”
That statistic shapes how she thinks about management accountability, not simply product design. “We’ve got a vested curiosity in encouraging folks to fulfill in individual.”
This extends into how Hinge approaches AI – an space now central to Match Group’s future technique. “We discuss AI as the way it can get behind daters and assist them join, not get between daters.” AI, in her framing, is a device for teaching, security and momentum, not automation for its personal sake.
What this implies for CMOs watching intently
Jantos’s ascent isn’t only a private milestone; it’s a press release. It means that the trail from CMO to CEO doesn’t require abandoning advertising and marketing instincts however deepening them. Understanding folks. Designing for outcomes. Treating model, product and tradition as a single system. Measuring success in human phrases, not simply monetary ones.
As she put it: “Should you’re going to construct a product for individuals who desperately need that product to work after which the product works, it’s a profitable technique.” For CMOs questioning what it takes to make the leap, Hinge might have simply supplied a transparent reply.
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