Motley Fool Money - 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 increasing 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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We watch that. We have opinions. Motley Full Money starts now. Welcome to Motley Full Money. I'm Deidro Ballard here with my co-host, Ricky Mulvey, 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. Have you enjoyed 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 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. You know, 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 friends. And also, I would say rebranding. A few in that would be Snapchat. Snapchat had a big campaign that it's not social media. It's so much healthier than that, Deidre. Also, soda's good for you now. Oli Pop's making that case.

And, you know, the company in the middle of a little bit of a rebrand is Budweiser and Bud Light specifically. You know, instead of it had its scandal with TikTok, it also had a lighter touch in Super Bowls last year with Miles Teller just sort of dancing in an apartment drinking Budweiser with his white. 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 the way back. We're Bud Light. One thing I had, I had a problem with that commercial, but 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 was like, they don't have lines at those. What are you doing, Bud Light?

Well, it also, it was poppy, not olive pop. 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 Ollie Popp instead of Poppy. They look very similar.

It's, it's, it's, it's, it's not a lot of differentiation there. Also, like 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 was on CBS, which is part of Paramount, which also owns Nickelodeon.

So you had this second, Bunch Bobby, more family-friendly feed, mostly the same ads, although I guess there were some of them that were cheaper around $300,000 for just so that's much cheaper, according to ad age. But I'm wondering about this division now, because it seems like, 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 been doing this on what Twitch for, for years now, where you live, like, people want to see a stream of someone watching a thing. If you have, 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 talking a little bit of trash back. I think it makes a ton of sense.

And 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's a little bit higher versus that hugely expensive ad on the national broadcast. My question is, did families even watch the Nickelodeon broadcast? because the only people I know that watched it were irony poisoned 30-somethings who were 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. Fair know.

I travel in both circles, Ricky. I don't know how appealing it is to watch the entire game on the Nickelodeon cast, but I don't know. I'm sure a lot of folks checked it out. I think it's a very different experience in terms of, you know, you're not gathered. I don't think you're gathering around and having a party around the Nickelodeon cast, but I could be wrong. And, you know, Paramount, they had the 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 broadcast or I think they called it the Bikini Bottom broadcast. Yeah. The game was transplanted to bikini bottom. Sandy Cheeks is a sideline reporter.

But yeah, I think that this is 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 of thing with Fox is my guess at least. And then, Deidre, to your question, as we jump around the outline here, I mean, Disney was strongly represented, but it's tough when Paramount has that home field advantage. It's able to do

its own broadcast. Disney's competing basically with a typewriter in a small ad for Disney Plus. So I would give Paramount the victory here. So let's talk about the Taylor Swift. factor. We've got to talk about the Taylor Swift factor, right? I mean, one of those things that I noticed is, yeah, you had a different audience in there. I mean, you started off with an ad for a menopause drug early on. You have certain, you had ELF cosmetics, you had Dove, which we talked about. You had a whole lot of T-Moo. I mean, my goodness, so much T-Mu, which is Pindu-Duo shopping. I believe it was pronounced Tammu, D-RU. 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, 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. That's because Travis wasn't doing anything the first quarter. I know, but you can still get the reactions like, ugh, oh, no. The restraint is amazing. Okay, bold strategy. You play the same low budget animation commercial three times over the Super Bowl. That space is $21 million. I think they had about a, $21,000 and $15 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 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 Tamu? 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 might be something there. They do like incredibly cheap like internet goods where they use like drop shippers to to send it to you.

So it's a 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, Ali Express, and then mark it up 10 or 20 percent and then just sell it back to us? Kind of, maybe. Kind of, except it's much, it's direct, so it's cheaper. So it's like really, really cheap fast fashion. But, okay, one more thing on Temu.

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. 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 Co-Star, 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 spot. And they did all these promo things before the big game. These ads, I don't know. I was expecting 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 don't really know that the, homes.com 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 seemed like it was just, hey, look at these celebrities and look at them, be goofy kind of thing. I don't know.

Like, 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's the point of Homes.com can they beat? Personally, I like Redfin. I think they have a very great search engine over there. So I don't know. It just seemed like a waste of money to me.

I like Dan Levy, the actor who was in those ads acting extra goofy. But, yeah, I don't think they did what they 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 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.

The Dunkings. Oh, yeah. With Ben Affleck and Matt Damon and J-Lo and Tom Brady. Even Fat Joe for a split second. Like, I thought that one was extremely funny, 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 real winner for the celebrity ad was Kate McKinnon with Helmand's Mayo with, like, the talking cat. Oh, so bad. They made the joke work a little. 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 bit of like a celebrity parade, the Linolemae with Mikhailob Ultra. Like, that was, that was pretty cool watching,

watching Messi 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, is a wonderful idea after watching that. I, the Kate McKinnon thing, at one point in that ad, she, She's eaten mayo directly out of the jar. Yeah. I physically recoiled from my TV at that moment. But you remember that. I guess so, but I mean, I'm not a mayo guy, so I wasn't going to buy Helmonds anyways.

There you go. It's not for you. Well, what do you think was the worst? So for me, like Etsy, and I've not been loving Etsy's ad campaigns lately. I get that they're trying to, they tried to be more than gifts. Now they're trying to be really just like gifts, gifts, gifts really. It's this is what you get us for. It didn't work for me.

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 ad though. Oh, so, okay. In the, in the, in the, no, we're not talking about celebrity ad. We can talk about worst ads in general. Yeah, 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, 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 there. And he's just like in a car. Like, what's happening here? Mr. I don't really like Marvel movies. His now is now doing Alien Squarespace ads. It's been quite the turn for one of my favorite directors.

Yeah, I didn't like the, the Beyonce T-Mobile ad. I thought that was, oh, you sorry, Verizon. Thank you. Yeah, I thought that one was pretty, I thought, I thought, I was, wasting Beyonce, you know, like, like Beyonce is a charismatic force of nature. And Tony Hale, who is 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 think they did well at all with that.

Did you get that she was promoting her album, though? I think they were throwing in the, we'll 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 didn't think it was anything more than just annoying, to be honest. This is the circle of cynicism. I'll also say DoorDash.

It felt like they were playing to only marketing executives by being like, ha-ha, 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. 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 during the Super Bowl. 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 talking. I guess if you're at like a Super Bowl party, you probably don't have the phone out on the couch. But again, father of a toddler over here. So my Super Bowl party was my wife and I on the couch. We have phones out. That's one of the best ways to do it.

So as we wrap up, overall, good use of money or bad use of money, Super Bowl lads. So I asked on the Motley Full Money X account, what commercial was the best use of the money? Some of the responses, 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. Eliot's 3. Neal and Rockville said Duncan Donuts.

Analog, 618, going with the E-Trade babies. Pickleball is just mini tennis with a wiffle ball, L.O.L. Then our next cloud one said none, $7 million worth. I wish I had a better answer than I don't know. I really don't know if any of them are worth $7 million. I think it was kind of a down year for Super Bowl ads. Just nothing all that fun. nothing. I mean, I think that, you know, the Duncan 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 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 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 good. But it's not what I'm looking for when it comes to Super Bowl ad entertainment. So, yeah, I definitely would call it a down year. I liked the Hellman's ad. 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 $7 million? Is your attention? Is Ricky's

business is worth $7 million? That's what I said. I don't know. One thing, though, on the overall, 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 whole lot of crypto ads this year, huh? No, where'd they go? Huh. Interesting. Things change.

Well, thanks, guys. Thanks, Deidre. Some of the best lessons don't come from a classroom. They come from experience. On The Power of Advice, a new podcast series from Capital Group, you'll hear from CEOs, investors, and founders about how they built careers, took risks, and reinvented themselves. If you're starting your own journey, this is the kind of advice you won't want to miss. Available wherever you get your podcast, published by Capital Client Group, Inc.

Bumble or Tinder might be the place to find your next date or BFF, but what about the stocks behind the apps? Mary Long talked with Rick Minare's about what to look for in matchmaking companies, and which ones might be worth making a commitment to. 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 Davina. 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 stats 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. So Bumble's slingshot is growth. Match is, as we've mentioned, undoubtedly larger than Bumble, but growth doesn't really seem to be happening in the same capacity. The stock is off around 80% from its all-time highs. And the company's biggest segment, Tinder,

has seen declining numbers of new users and paying users in the latest quarter. So with that in mind, what is the bull case for Match Group? For Match? Okay, so 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 delivered single-digit growth in 2022 and again in 2023, but it's been profitable for years, so it 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 I had just last summer. And with profit starting to climb, now the stock is trading for just 16 times trailing earnings. So this is like a meat 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, it's got about 15.2 million total users to Bumbles 3.8 across apps. I hear that. First thing I think is more people, more options, yes, but also more data. Like if these apps are

using algorithms to run people, match that 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 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 capax across a much larger base, matchgroup has the ability to spend that much more to see what works and what does it. 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 advantage are definitely there. How much data it has to plug into the algorithm, that remains to 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 up front that they're going to find their person on this app rather than that one. So how does that? How do you? How do you? How do you 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. So apps, obviously, they live and die by how they manage their customer acquisition cost. 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 figures going up. Bumble, on the other hand, its sales and marketing cost 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 take marketing cost or customer acquisition cost 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 E-Harmony, which is sort of like the top app gays 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, 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. Match 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? 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 this current levels, and it's not afraid to eat its own cooking. So, just this 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.

Bumble's founder, Whitney Wolf Hurd, you mentioned this. She stepped away from the company in November of last year. And so Bumbles brought in former Slack CEO, Lydiaan Jones, as Herd's replacement. Match has kind of also had its mix-up or its CEO shake-up. Faye Iosa-Tuluno was named CEO of Tinder. She's been at Match Group for a while. She's been at Tinder for about 18 months as C-O-O 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. 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 Batch 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. You know, the paying users has declined. It's lower than it was a year ago and even lower 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 like shunning traditional dating apps and opting more. for, I'll use the term tertiary social media sites. They're finding love on Strava and dual lingo and less so on hinge, say. We talked about struggling new user numbers, et cetera. Is this emblematic of a shift away from dating apps? How worried should either company be about this? I don't even know if we can call it a trend, but about this story. Yeah, I mean, 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. So the pandemic was a scary time, obviously. And 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. 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, for each of these companies is relatively similar. Match is trading at about 3.2 times sales and Bumble closer to two. 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 at all, 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. So, 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.

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 Wolf heard stepped down in November was, you know, 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. Lidianne 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. 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 interests in the stock. stocks they talk about. And The Motley Fool may have former recommendations for or against. So don't

buy ourselves stocks based solely on what you hear. I'm Dieter Willard. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.