Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - Are Big Ads Worth The Spend?

Episode Date: February 12, 2024

Celebrities, talking cats, and bad animation, did those Big Game ads connect? (00:21) Ricky Mulvey, Dan Boyd and Deidre Woollard discuss: - What brands are looking for from a major spend. - The inc...reasing bifurcation of the watching experience. - If it takes more than a celebrity or three to make a great ad. (19:11) Mary Long and Rick Munarriz compare Match and Bumble and break down the prospects for these two publicly traded matchmakers. Companies discussed: PARA, DIS, PDD, MTCH, BMBL, ETSY, VZ, CGSP, RDFN, MNST Get your 30-day free trial of Monarch Money at www.monarchmoney.com/fool Host: Deidre Woollard Guests: Ricky Mulvey, Dan Boyd, Mary Long, Rick Munarriz Producer: Ricky Mulvey Engineers: Dan Boyd, Rick Engdahl Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 You've got to try breakfast at A&W. You've got to try breakfast at A&W. And what better way than with the delicious Pret Organic Coffee? Starting with just one dollar, all day, every day, now until December 31st. You've got to try breakfast at A&W. At participating A&W locations in Ontario. We watch dads. We have opinions. Motley Fool Money starts now. Welcome to Motley Fool Money. I'm Deidre O'Leard here with my co-host, Vicki Mulvey,
Starting point is 00:00:54 and our engineer, Dan Boyd. For a special ads review Monday, we're going to evaluate some of the ads we saw yesterday, see if those publicly traded companies get their $7 million for 30 seconds money worth. Welcome, guys. How'd you enjoy the game? Well, the game was actually good this time. So it's nice that the Super Bowl was a good game for once. So yeah, it was a good time. Good game. I appreciate the rule change that holding is no longer an offensive penalty. Well, I was thinking about the ads last night, kind of dividing them up into the reasons that a company runs an ad that costs that much. I mean, obviously you've got the audience, but
Starting point is 00:01:30 you kind of have to have a reason, I think. So there's general awareness, right? I mean, you know, that's like your Budweiser or something like that. There's a special promotion, like the TurboTax thing. You've got maybe a new flavor of something or a movie. What else? What other reasons do companies have for spending all this money? I mean, I think there's the element of on the biggest stage, look at how good we are. Look at how good we are as a brand. The NFL did that. Dove did that. I will save my comments about Pfizer. And also, I mean, don't discount the ego element among some marketing executives. This is the biggest stage for marketers. You know the folks in the C-suite know that. And this is their time to maybe show off a little bit to
Starting point is 00:02:13 friends. And also, I would say rebranding. A few in that would be Snapchat. Snapchat had a big campaign that it's, it's not social media. It's so much healthier than that. Deidre also, soda is good for you now. Olipop's making that case. And, uh, you know, the company in the middle of, of a little bit of a rebrand is, is, uh, Budweiser and Bud Light specifically, you know, instead of, uh, it had its, it had its scandal with Tik TOK. It also, it had a lighter touch in super bowls last year with miles Teller, just sort of dancing in an apartment, drinking Budweiser with his wife listening to hold music no now it's back in neighborhood bars you know remember us you love us you bring us to parties hey we even cast a white guy as a genie look at us we're all
Starting point is 00:02:55 the way back we're bud light one thing i had i had a problem with that commercial but in in a weird way they were like waiting in line to get into a place right and then the genie like zapped him into the place and it turned out it was just some like regular old neighborhood bar looking place and i did i was like they don't have lines at those what are you doing bud light well it also uh it was it was poppy not olipop so clearly uh clearly that brand didn't quite work what was i mean could you say soda more in a commercial every other word was soda it was extremely grating they got the message clear but i forgot the i don't know why i thought it was olipop instead of poppy they look very similar it's it's okay there's not a lot of differentiation there
Starting point is 00:03:40 i also like the vagueness about the poppy it was like it's soda but it's good how is it good trust us it's good exactly well and this year was different too because it's on it was on cbs which is part of paramount which also owns nickelodeon so you had this second fun bobby more family friendly feed uh most mostly the same ads although i guess there were some of them that were cheaper around $300,000, so that's much cheaper according to ad age. But I'm wondering about this division now, because it seems like we're not necessarily gathering around the big linear TV anymore. Maybe people are watching on streaming. Maybe people are watching on other channels. So is this the future where it's not all in one spot? I mean, I think it makes a ton of sense. People have
Starting point is 00:04:30 been doing this on Twitch for years now, where you live, like people want to see a stream of someone watching a thing. If you have family, you know, your kids are probably going to watch SpongeBob a little bit more. I watched some of the highlight clips, a little cringy, but also kind of funny. You know, you have George Kittle explaining how he wants to meet Larry, the lobster, Larry, the lobster track talking a little bit of trash back. I think it makes a ton of sense. And there's also, if you're a marketer, you can focus in a little bit more. If you're buying a cheaper ad on Nickelodeon where maybe the CPM is a little bit higher versus that why like hugely expensive ad on the on the national broadcast my question is did families even watch
Starting point is 00:05:10 the nickelodeon broadcast because the only people i know that watched it were irony poisoned 30 somethings who are doing it for a laugh i mean how many irony poisoned 30 somethings do you know versus like i know a lot of both as a father of a toddler it's you know i i I travel in both circles, Ricky. I don't know how appealing it is to watch the entire game on the nickel, like the Nickelodeon cast, but I don't know. I'm sure a lot of, a lot of folks checked it out. I think it's a very different experience in terms of, you know, you're not gabbed. I don't think you're gathering around and having a party around, around the Nickelodeon cast, but, uh, but I could be wrong and, you know, paramount, they had the, they had the
Starting point is 00:05:53 home field advantage in terms of putting lots of CBS promos on there, but you also had a lot of disney so who did it better what do you think well the point i wanted to make real quick i just want to backtrack a little bit and say ricky is spot on with the twitch comparison people love to watch people they like watching something so something like the spongebob super bowl broadcaster i think they called it the bikini bottom broadcast yeah the game was transplanted to bikini bottom sandy cheeks is a sideline reporter but uh yeah i think i think that this is this kind of thing is only going to grow in popularity and i think that next super bowl will probably see some more i don't want to say serious but some more serious representations of this sort
Starting point is 00:06:43 of thing uh with with fox is my guess at least and then deidre to your question is as we as we jump around the outline here i mean disney was strongly represented but it's it's it's tough when Paramount has that home field advantage. Um, it's able to do its own broadcast. Disney's competing basically with a, with a typewriter in a small ad for Disney plus. So I would give Paramount the victory here. So let's talk about the, the, the Taylor Swift factor. We got to talk about the Taylor Swift factor, right? I mean, one of the things that I noticed is, yeah, you had a different audience in there. I mean, you started off with, uh, an ad for a menopause drug early on. You've certainly, you had ELF cosmetics, you had Dove, which we talked about. We had,
Starting point is 00:07:26 you had a whole lot of Timu. I mean, my goodness, so much Timu, which is a Pinduoduo shopping. I believe it's pronounced Temu. Temu, right? I know I should have learned. It's terrible. They spent so big, so much and the ads weren't, they weren't great. They were annoying. Did that pay off at all? I mean, it's a, it's a, let's, let's focus first on Taylor Swift. They did not show her until the second quarter so they they waited a little bit the restraint because travis wasn't doing anything the first quarter i know but you can still get the reactions like oh no the restraint it was amazing okay bold strategy you play the same low budget animation commercial three times over the super bowl that space is 21 million dollars i think they had about a 21
Starting point is 00:08:10 million dollar 21 million and 15 dollar marketing budget however for as much hate as temu is getting If you look at the app store right now, it's the number one shopping app. It has some class action lawsuits against it that I would recommend listeners check out before they start buying things on there. And it also on the Google search traffic page, it looks like the buzz is wearing off fairly quickly, but you know what? Is it better to have a cringy advertisement that people are talking about? Or if you have something like, let's say Bass Pro Shop or Ford, where you spend a bunch
Starting point is 00:08:44 of money on the ad space and then it's a complete fastball down the middle that's easily forgotten against the much more memorable advertisements i'm going for the cringe that's a good point ricky like are terrible ads good when it comes to something like the super bowl is something like temu because their ab was so let's to put it mildly crappy like and people are talking about it because it was incredibly an incredibly annoying song poor animation it looked like they got somebody on fiverr to do it for them like but we're talking about it on the show right now i'm still not 100 sure what temu is or what it does or why i would want to use it but maybe the fact that it's a bad ad that gets a lot of reach there's might be something there they do like
Starting point is 00:09:32 incredibly cheap like internet goods where they use like drop shippers to send it to you so it's little bit i would say of a almost a mix between like it's like a weird cousin of etsy and amazon so is this like one of those things where they buy a bunch of super cheap stuff from like aliexpress yeah and mark it up 10 or 20 and then just sell it back to us kind of maybe i mean except it's it's much it's it's direct so it's cheaper so it's like really really cheap fast fashion But OK, one more thing on Temu. I will I will not remember the promo code that DoorDash tried to get me to remember that was like super long. I will remember shop like a billionaire. Yeah. What does that even mean? It means that you're buying politicians and you own private jets, Dan Boyd.
Starting point is 00:10:21 Oh, they sell politicians and private jets on Temu. News to me. Well, speaking of billions, so one of the things that I've been sort of obsessed with is CoStar, which is the parent company of Apartments.com and Homes.com. Before the Super Bowl, they came out with this idea. We're telling agents, basically, we're going to spend a billion dollars. We're basically buying our way into Zillow's spot. And they did all these promo things before the big game. These ads, I don't know. I was expecting something, something bigger, but I think, and the real estate agents that I'm like in social media groups with, they were also expecting something bigger, but for you guys, you're, you've don't really know that the homes.com
Starting point is 00:11:07 or anything like that. Did it move you? Would you be more likely to go there over Zillow? C plus it didn't really work on me. I thought it was weird that none of the ads really showed people buying a home or an apartment from the ones i saw yeah yeah it's it seemed like it was just hey look at these celebrities and look at them be goofy kind of thing i don't know it like the the good things about like zillow and redfin are their ubiquitousness and how you can look up any listing or get into any neighborhood and see what you know the intangibles are right so what what's the point of homes.com can they beat that personally i like redfin uh i think they have a very great search engine over there uh so i i don't know it just seemed like a waste of money
Starting point is 00:11:53 to me i like dan levy the the actor who was in in those ads acting extra goofy but uh yeah i don't i don't think they did what they were were looking for there and i think that's a question of the celebrity in general because we had celebrities stuffed into everything and it wasn't like it It used to be just like you'd get one celebrity in an ad. Now you've got three, four, five, six all over the place, stuffed in everywhere. You saw an awful lot of Dan Marino, a lot of Tom Brady. What worked for you in terms of celebrity ads? Oh, the Dunkin' ad.
Starting point is 00:12:25 The Dunkings with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon and J-Lo and Tom Brady and even Fat Joe for a split second. like i i thought that one was extremely funny uh especially with matt damon's reluctance to continue to be ben affleck's friend i thought it was a good time i have an overall take on this i'll get to later but i thought mountain dew with aubrey plaza and nick offerman that was that was a funny bit like they did a good bit and it was kind of focused and i thought the the real winner for the celebrity ad was uh kate mckinnon with hellman's mayo with like the talking cat and they make so bad made the joke work a little bit. I thought it was kind of funny. And at least it wasn't the parade of celebrities for, I would say the borrowing cool factor. And they did a little
Starting point is 00:13:12 bit of like a celebrity parade, the, the little messy with Michelob ultra, like that was, that was pretty cool. Watching, watching messy play soccer on a beach. I don't know if you needed Dan Moreno. And in that, I mean, I was ready to believe that mixing carbonated alcohol and cardio is a wonderful idea after watching that i the kate mckinnon thing at one point in that ad she's eaten mayo directly out of the jar yeah i physically recoiled from my tv at that moment but you remember that i i guess so but i mean i'm not a mayo guy so i wasn't gonna buy hellman's anyways there you go it's not for you well what what do you think was the worst so for me like etsy and i've i've not been loving etsy's ad campaigns lately um i get that they're trying
Starting point is 00:13:57 to they they tried to be more than gifts now they're trying to be really just like gifts gifts really it's this is what you get us for it it didn't work for me as are there ones that like really didn't work for you i mean tamu was awful but we already covered that that's a celebrity not a celebrity ad though oh so okay in the no we're not talking about celebrity we can talk about worst ads in general ricky okay i felt gross watching martin scorsese do a squarespace ad oh that one was bad yeah yeah i don't know i just i was i was i was cringing not in like a uh this is awkward way i was just like oof oof i don't like that especially it was it was almost like a non-sequitur too it was like the ad didn't make any sense and then you have martin scorsese in
Starting point is 00:14:40 there and he's just like in a car like what's what's happening here mr i don't really like Marvel movies is now, is now doing alien Squarespace ads. It's been, it's been quite the, quite the turn for, for one of my favorite directors. Yeah. I didn't like the, the Beyonce T-Mobile ad. I thought that was, I'm sorry, Verizon. Uh, thank you. Yeah. I thought that one was pretty, uh, I thought, I thought it was wasting Beyonce, you know, like, like Beyonce is a charismatic force of nature. And, uh, Tony Hale, who was partnered with her in that ad is a very funny actor and comedian but that whole bit just fell extremely flat to me i don't i don't think they did well at all with that did you get that she was promoting her album though
Starting point is 00:15:22 i i think they were throwing in the we'll release like release the music at the end of the ad every time and i guess there's a tie-in i don't know it didn't make any sense i i didn't think it was anything more than just annoying to be honest this is this is the circle of cynicism i'll also say door dash it felt like they were playing to only marketing executives by being like haha look at how long this promo code is and then i think the sign for me i did some research before this they gave viewers less than three seconds to scan a qr code oh i i will bet that there is a meeting where they are wondering why the direct response to the qr code is not going as well as they would have liked and it's because you have to be very quick very quick on the gun to get that qr code
Starting point is 00:16:08 during the during the super well i mean didn't you have your phone out the whole time chatting with your friends about the super bowl while you were watching it sometimes i mean the super bowl is a second screen experience like i want to see what's going on on twitter but i'm also you know i was making some food i was i was talking i guess if you're at like a super bowl party you probably don't have the phone out on the couch uh but again father of a toddler over here so my super bowl party it was uh my wife and i on the couch with phones out that's one of the best ways to do it so as as we wrap up overall good use of money or bad use of money super bowl ads so uh i asked on the motley fool money x account what commercial was the best use of the money
Starting point is 00:16:52 some of the responses uh silk with jeremy renner you know a guy who almost died doesn't add for bone health perfect use of a celebrity that's from rkt elliott's three neil and rockville said dunkin donuts analog 618 going with the e-trade babies pickleball is just mini tennis with a wiffle ball lol then our for uh next cloud one said none seven million dollars worth i wish i had a better answer than i don't know i really don't know if it's any of them are worth seven million dollars i think it was kind of a down year for super bowl ads uh just nothing nothing all that funny nothing i mean i think that you know the dunkin ad stands out as the funniest for me but there was really no laugh out loud moments during the uh during the ads i mean that's
Starting point is 00:17:39 something that was definitely missing the whole part of the entertainment of super bowl ads i think is that you're you got to have funny ones right like there were some definitely some uh extremely not funny ads this time around uh with like the anti-bullying campaign from the nfl and things of that nature which are important and and good uh but it's not what i'm looking for when it comes to super bowl ad entertainment uh so yeah i definitely would call it a down year i liked the hellman's that that made me laugh i know you didn't think it was funny they got one person i'll also say too is that worth seven million does is your attention is ricky's business is worth seven million dollars that's what i said i don't
Starting point is 00:18:24 know one thing though on the the overall like it did make me think about awareness marketing and you know is it worth it and who does it the best because the companies that spend a lot of money on awareness marketing are i think of energy drinks and monster energy you don't see them doing super bowl ads but they spend a ton of money on awareness marketing and the reason it works for them is because they're able to fully integrate into very specific events motocross monster trucks the UFC, they know their audience really well. And they show you that logo again and again and again. And I think that's really hard to do in a 30 second commercial when you're competing against so many other advertisers. Yeah, that's a good point. That's a really good point. Hey, not a
Starting point is 00:19:07 whole lot of crypto ads this year, huh? No, where'd they go? Interesting. Things change. Well, thanks, guys. Thanks, Deidre. You just found out that your sales team is at risk of missing quota. Don't panic. Just ask Rippling AI. Since it's built on your real-time people and business data, Rippling AI can pull metrics from Rippling and Salesforce into a meeting-ready dashboard showing quota attainment, headcount plan, and monthly revenue to quota by region. In seconds, you'll see exactly what's behind your quota risk and fix it before it's missed. Question answered, action taken crisis averted when you have critical business questions that need answers don't just file a ticket and wait weeks for an outdated report describe what you need and have rippling
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Starting point is 00:20:46 I think to talk about dating app stocks feels a bit like a story of David and Goliath, because in one corner, you've got Match Group, which is a $10.2 billion behemoth that owns Tinder, Hinge, Match, about 40 dating apps and sites. In the other corner, there's Bumble, with a $1.87 billion market cap. Why would a person put their money on Bumble, the seeming underdog in this fight? Well, Bumble's slingshot in this fight is growth. This David is consistently growing faster than the Goliath in this example. Bumble has turned annual revenue growth of at least 18% for four consecutive years. It's up 18% through the first nine months of 2023. Another reason to invest in Bumble is that this David is actually a divina.
Starting point is 00:21:29 Founder Whitney Wilford was a member of the Tinder founding team in 2012, but left two years later to launch a site that places women at the center of the dating app balance. And Bumble became one of the first apps for only female-identifying and eventually non-binary users can initiate contact with an interested match. And finally, a knock-on Bumble in the past is its lack of consistent profitability on a reported basis. It's been reporting adjusted earnings for some time, but on a reported basis, not so much. It finally turned the corner last year. It's come through with back-to-back quarters of positive net income, and that's likely to grow in the years to come. Bumble's slingshot is growth. Match is, as we've mentioned, undoubtedly larger than Bumble,
Starting point is 00:22:10 but growth doesn't really seem to be happening in the same capacity. The stock is off around 80% from its all-time highs. The company's biggest segment, Tinder, has seen declining numbers of new users and paying users in the latest quarter. With that in mind, what is the bull case for Match Group? Obviously, we'll start with the fact that it is the undisputed top dog. Tinder, which is the primary match app, is the world's most popular online dating app. This is a major advantage. When you tell someone after they break up that there's other fish in the sea, you want them to be splashing around in the largest ocean possible. That's Tinder. Match Group, yes, you mentioned it. It's not growing as quickly as Bumble. It
Starting point is 00:22:50 delivered single-digit growth in 2022 and again in 2023, but it's been profitable for years. So, but has that going for it, long-term profitability. And finally, the third thing working right now in Match Group's favor is that the starting line, it's kind. Right now, the stock is down 80% from its all-time high in 2021, and it's down almost 30% from its summertime high just last summer. And with profits starting to climb, now the stock is trading for just 16 times trailing earnings. So, this is like a meet-cute where growth and value sort of just bump into one another at a train station. I think you can get both in Match Group. Sounds like an ideal rom-com scenario. Yeah, the thing with Match Group,
Starting point is 00:23:26 it's got about 15.2 million total users to Bumble's 3.8 across apps. I hear that. First thing I think is more people, more options, yes, but also more data. If these apps are using algorithms to run people, having more people on its collection of apps gives it more data to make successful matches. Is that true? Do we see that massive amount of data that Match Group has access to actually gives its algorithms a leg up? Is there a way to quantify that? Yeah. Well, obviously, there are scalability advantages. And obviously, the more data you can feed into a platform, the better the potential algorithm and the better the potential outcomes. However, there's also a reason why Match Group has more than three dozen other
Starting point is 00:24:09 sites just beyond Tinder. Being the Walmart or McDonald's of online dating is great, but sometimes folks want a more specialized experience. So, yes, just like Netflix can afford to spend more on content than any other streaming service because it can divide its capex across a much larger base. Match Group has the ability to spend that much more to see what works and what doesn't. Unfortunately for Match Group and dating apps in general, unlike Netflix, where it can actually see how long you went into a show when you stop watching a series, Match Group doesn't follow you on your dates. It just matches you up and that's all it really has. But again, yeah, the scalability advantages are definitely there. How much data it has to plug into its algorithm, that remains to
Starting point is 00:24:46 be seen. The future is very exciting. How much of this business is marketing? To get people to use, swipe, and pay on one of these apps, you have to get them to believe upfront that they're going to find their person on this app rather than that one. How closely do you look at each company's marketing spend? Is there a way to measure which company has a better return on that kind of spend? Yes. Apps, obviously, they live and die by how they manage their customer acquisition cost. of. Match has seen its sales and marketing costs go from 16% of its revenue a year ago to 18% in its latest quarter. Obviously, not good when that figure is going up. Bumble, on the other
Starting point is 00:25:24 hand, its sales and marketing costs went from 26% to 24% over the last year. Bumble is obviously higher, but it's trending in the right direction. However, you can't just take marketing costs or customer acquisition costs at face value. Bumble is doing a better job in average revenue per user, and you also have to look at the lifetime of a customer. The irony of online dating sites is that if they're really good at what they do and they pair you up with that only person you want to date for the rest of your life, you don't need the app anymore. There's a reason why eHarmony, which is sort of like the top app gaze for people looking to find the one instead of the next one, is more expensive as a platform because they know once you have that long-term relationship,
Starting point is 00:26:02 your relationship with the app is a very short-term relationship. So this works in the favor of Tinder or Bumble that can be largely seen as hookup apps because they're geared more for people that want to date different people without having to get on bended knee or swap apartment keys or anything like that. I think you can spend years on either app and still feel good about yourself and not feel like you're falling short. Matt's generated $785 million in free cash flow over the trailing 12 months. And management has said over the past two quarters that it intends to return at least 50% of that free cash flow to shareholders via share buybacks and other means. How do the capital allocation strategies at each company differ?
Starting point is 00:26:38 Yeah. So, Bumble is similar. While it's smaller and it generated just about $150 million in free cash flow over the last 12 months, obviously a lot less than Match Group, it has that same capacity where it feels, hey, my stock is down more than 80% from its all-time high. It's an undervalued at its current levels, and it's not afraid to eat its own cooking. So, just as Match Group has no problem buying back its own shares and making that commitment, in November, Bumble doubled their share buyback authorization to $300 million. dollars. Bumble's founder, Whitney Wolfe Hurd, you mentioned this. She stepped away from the company in November of last year. And so Bumble's brought in a former Slack CEO,
Starting point is 00:27:15 Lydianne Jones, as Hurd's replacement. Match has kind of also had its mix-up or its CEO shake-up. Faye Iosa Toluno was named CEO of Tinder. She's been at Match Group for a while. She's been at Tinder for about 18 months as COO before being named the chief executive role. What are your benchmark exams for each leader? What do you want to have seen them initiated or accomplished in the next year, five years? Yeah. So, there are a lot of new leaders here. And even for Match Group, the parent company, they got a new CEO less than two years ago. So, obviously, Tinder, Bumble, and Match Group as a whole, all with new leadership, recent leadership. I think at Bumble, the near-term goal is pretty straightforward. They need to build on that newfound profitability.
Starting point is 00:27:54 They've always been a good revenue growth story. Now that they have a little taste of profitability on a reported basis, and obviously much healthier on an adjusted basis, can they build on that? Over the next five years, the goal has to be the same for both companies. And this is that grow the business. You have to, A, have to grow the business. B, you have to grow market share. And C, you also have to improve its operating efficiency to the point where the bottom line is even stronger. And I guess I didn't get to match groups, their short term in one year. I think obviously their biggest problem right now, the thing that's sort of scaring people is that their usage growth, the paying users has declined. It's lower than it was a year ago and even lower
Starting point is 00:28:28 now than it was two years ago. They need to pick that up because even though the revenue per user is going up, you don't want to be in a situation where you feel that my company's losing market share. My investment is no longer the top dog. I think that it needs to find a way to grow its numbers again, regardless of the math involved. There was a story making the rounds late last year about how more and more people are shunning traditional dating apps and opting more for, I'll use the term tertiary social media sites. They're finding love on Strava and Duolingo and less so on Hinge, say. We talked about struggling new user numbers, etc. Is this emblematic of a shift away from dating apps? How worried should either company be about this? I don't even know
Starting point is 00:29:10 if we can call it a trend, but about this story. Yeah. I hope not, but I don't see it that way. I think a lot of people aren't matching the numbers to the narrative that they want to believe in this case. The pandemic was a scary time, obviously. You might think there wasn't a lot of dating in 2020 when we were sheltering in place for months, but revenue at Match Group and Bumble rose 17% and 18% respectively that year. In 2021, we got vaccinations, business is open, travel restrictions eased up, business skyrocketed for both companies. And now we've had two years of back-to-back decelerating revenue growth at these two companies. I don't think that people are not going to give up on these apps just because they're on a certain app. To me,
Starting point is 00:29:48 yeah, sure, the ability now that people can go to bars, concerts, festivals, it makes it less necessary to rely on the app to meet someone because you're actually out there in the wild and making connections on your own. But I do think that this is the kind of thing where I can't compare. I mean, I'm on Duolingo and I never approach it as the other people in my French Sapphire league are actually like trying to hit on your vice versa. Just all we have is an affinity to want to learn a foreign language. Or maybe it's just that I've been married 33 years and I don't know what flirting is anymore. The price to sales ratio for each of these companies is relatively similar. Match is trading at about 3.2 times sales, and Bumble closer to 2.
Starting point is 00:30:25 Considering that, and everything else that we've discussed today, if you can only give your final rose to one of these companies, which has your vote as the better buy? I'm handling the rose, Thorns et al., knowing that I'll get pricked by the Thorns, possibly in the process, too, to Bumble. I'm a growth investor, and I'll take a disruptive speeder over the established leader if it's gaining market share, and especially now that it's become a bottom-line growth story, too. Both stocks are trading, as I mentioned earlier, about 80% from their all-time highs. I think both stocks are attracted now. I think both can beat the market. They have challenges, but I think both can beat the market in the next one, three, or five years.
Starting point is 00:30:59 Take your pick. I think that's where they all do well. To me, the one red flag that I initially had in Bumble when Whitney Wolfe stepped down in November was, she's gone. This was such a leadership-driven company. But the more I just read about it and said, well, she has an amazing story being at the genesis of these two world's largest dating sites. Lydianne came in from leadership roles at Microsoft and Salesforce. She was at Salesforce when they acquired Slack. That's why she became CEO of Slack for a little while. And they trusted her with that. And now Bumble gives her the company, hey, take over here. Bumble's no longer playing Cupid. I think it's at the point now where it's now a tech platform with the masses. And I think she should do well there.
Starting point is 00:31:40 And I think Bumble as an investment will do well with the new leadership at this point. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against. So don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. I'm Deidre Bullard. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.

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