Loopylove.com hires Inferno for £3m task

by Ed Kemp, Marketing 20-Nov-07, 08:40

LONDON - Associated Northcliffe Digital has hired Inferno to handle the £3m relaunch of its dating website, LoopyLove.com.

The agency will create a fresh identity for the free-to-join service, which, according to Hitwise, is the UK's fourth-biggest dating website by hits. It will also relaunch its website with additional features. Members can search for potential partners through instant messaging, pictures and video content.

Inferno, which picked up the account without a pitch, will support the relaunch with a range of on- and off-line promotional activity. The offline work will span direct-response press, outdoor and ambient activity, which will aim to drive traffic to the website.

The LoopyLove.com site, which was launched in 2003, is entirely funded by ads; it has more than 1.6m unique visitors a month.

The site is operated by online dating business Allegran, which was acquired by Associated Northcliffe last year.

Allegran, which also operates other dating sites, such as Girls Date For Free, Dating for Parents, Pocado, and Dreams Discovered, continues to be run independently, but has developed partnerships with its parent company's websites, including This is London, Metro Online and Mail Online.

Allegran leads the UK web dating market with a 23% share, according to Hitwise. There are more than 140 dating sites in the UK; the biggest being Dating Direct, which has more than 5m members.

Dating websites in the UK attracted more than 6.4m unique visitors in May this year, with 13.4% of all UK internet users visiting a personals site that month, according to website traffic measurement group comScore World Metrix.