{"id":106766,"date":"2025-12-18T03:24:29","date_gmt":"2025-12-18T03:24:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2025\/12\/18\/why-hinges-new-ceo-sounds-like-a-marketer-because-she-is-one\/"},"modified":"2025-12-18T03:25:29","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T03:25:29","slug":"why-hinges-new-ceo-sounds-like-a-marketer-because-she-is-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2025\/12\/18\/why-hinges-new-ceo-sounds-like-a-marketer-because-she-is-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Hinge\u2019s new CEO sounds like a marketer \u2013 because she is one"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Jackie Jantos\u2019s promotion from CMO to CEO isn\u2019t only a management change, it\u2019s 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

When Jackie Jantos appeared on The Drum Podcast<\/a> in June, she wasn\u2019t 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\u2019 promotion to CEO of Hinge, following the exit of founder Justin McLeod.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On the time of the podcast recording, she was Hinge\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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From CMO to CEO with out altering the mindset<\/strong><\/h2>\n

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. \u201cIt has expanded, primarily giving me broader accountability for the expansion of the group, past simply the advertising and marketing work.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

That framing issues. There\u2019s no try to distance herself from advertising and marketing, no suggestion that \u2018actual\u2019 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile you have a look at the class that we\u2019re in, the connection enterprise, it is rather a lot related to folks and to tradition,\u201d she stated. \u201cCMOs are accountable for folks and tradition and ensuring what you are promoting, product and repair is deeply related now and sooner or later.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In different phrases, this isn\u2019t a marketer studying to be a CEO, it\u2019s a CEO who realized the enterprise by advertising and marketing first.<\/p>\n

Advertising as product technique, not promotion<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Jantos repeatedly returns to the concept that advertising and marketing isn’t downstream of product, however upstream of innovation. \u201cA whole lot of the work that I\u2019ve accomplished within the advertising and marketing capability has pulled ahead the insights which might be significantly related in our class.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

These insights into how folks behave, what they concern, what they need and what holds them again feed instantly into product choices. \u201cWe\u2019ve had an outsized influence in supporting product innovation and the place the product goes.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

That is the place the CMO-to-CEO shift turns into instructive for the broader business. Jantos isn\u2019t describing advertising and marketing as storytelling concerning the product; she\u2019s describing it as a system for understanding human outcomes and designing in direction of them.<\/p>\n

\u2018Designed to Be Deleted\u2019 is a enterprise philosophy<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Nowhere is that clearer than in Hinge\u2019s most well-known positioning. \u201cIndividuals would possibly see it as a tagline, however truly that\u2019s a philosophy that drives how we design our product and the way we design the entire advertising and marketing.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

That philosophy is unusually blunt for a subscription-based enterprise. \u201cAt its core, we’re designing for an consequence and that consequence is a superb date.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The end result isn’t engagement, time spent or retention curves. It\u2019s an ending and a profitable one. That creates pressure with typical subscription logic \u2013 one thing Jantos addressed head-on. \u201cOur enterprise mannequin additionally depends on natural development. We’d like phrase of mouth and we have to work as a product.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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. \u201cWe’ve got an incredible quantity of {couples} who meet on Hinge. We inform their tales so much\u2026 and due to that storytelling, we develop.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Wish to go deeper? Ask The Drum<\/h4>\n


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Why Hinge protects the free expertise<\/strong><\/h2>\n

One other sign of how deeply this considering runs: Hinge\u2019s remedy of its free product. \u201cOur free product has way more customers and it’s sacred.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

For Jantos, accessibility isn\u2019t a advertising and marketing line it\u2019s a development precept. \u201cWe wish love and relationships to be accessible to everybody, so we focus totally on the free product.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

That is additionally why Hinge has resisted promoting, at the same time as different platforms seek for incremental income. \u201cFor us, adverts are interference alongside that journey.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The expertise is optimized round a single consequence: serving to folks transfer from digital interplay to real-world connection.<\/p>\n

Gen Z, loneliness and management accountability<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Jantos\u2019s promotion additionally lands amid a wider reckoning about know-how\u2019s function in loneliness, significantly for Gen Z. \u201cGen Z at present spend 1,000 hours much less time within the firm of one other individual.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

That statistic shapes how she thinks about management accountability, not simply product design. \u201cWe’ve got a vested curiosity in encouraging folks to fulfill in individual.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

This extends into how Hinge approaches AI \u2013 an space now central to Match Group\u2019s future technique. \u201cWe discuss AI as the way it can get behind daters and assist them join, not get between daters.\u201d AI, in her framing, is a device for teaching, security and momentum, not automation for its personal sake.<\/p>\n

What this implies for CMOs watching intently<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Jantos\u2019s ascent isn\u2019t only a private milestone; it\u2019s a press release. It means that the trail from CMO to CEO doesn\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As she put it: \u201cShould you\u2019re going to construct a product for individuals who desperately need that product to work after which the product works, it\u2019s a profitable technique.\u201d For CMOs questioning what it takes to make the leap, Hinge might have simply supplied a transparent reply.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n