This billboard, on display in Cottonwood Heights, isn't a joke, the organizers say. (Photo: Debbie Dujanovic / KSL Newsradio)
SALT LAKE CITY — Looming over the highway by Cottonwood Canyon is a massive, red billboard that boasts: “LDS Millionaire looking for his wife.”
Other than a link to a website – LDSMillionaireMatchmaker.com – and the promise of an “exclusive VIP event” on June 7th, the billboard doesn’t tell you anything else. There are no hints to the bachelor’s name, what he looks like, or what you might find inside his tax returns. Instead, it just offers one quality that the organizers, apparently, hope will be enough to lure women in: his money.
It sounds like a joke or, at best, a pitch for a new TV show, but the group behind the billboard – Love Experts, Inc. – say it’s anything but.
“It’s really happening,” Erin Shurtz, a matchmaker for The Love Experts, Inc., told KSL Newsradio’s Dave &Dujanovic. “This is real.”
Millionaire matchmaker promises an “unforgettable evening” for the 20 women chosen. (Image: Millionaire Matchmaker)
Shurtz won’t give away the identity of the mystery millionaire trying to find love through strategic billboard placement, but she was willing to share a few insights.
“He’s tall, dark, and handsome, he’s never been married, he’s originally from Southern California, and a fun fact about him … is he was at one point a speechwriter for one of our presidents,” Schurtz revealed.
The millionaire bachelor, Shurtz says, is also a “midsingle” – an LDS bachelor between the ages of 31 and 45 – and someone Shurtz has personally known for a good 20 years, including one year as his personal matchmaker.
The billboard, she says, is his way of getting around the modern world of online dating and trying something a little different. He’s been frustrated, she says, with the culture of online dating, where most judgments are made off nothing more than a profile picture and a quick “About Me” blurb.
“I thought: we needed to come up with an out-of-the-box way to introduce him to women,” Shurtz says. “What can we do to make it so that we’re not giving away too much, but we can intrigue people enough to just take a chance on love?”
The answer, it seems, was his bank account. And so Shurtz and The Love Experts, Inc., set up a billboard and a website advertising the opportunity to be one of 20 women who will be going on an exclusive data with the mystery millionaire.
Only twenty women will be selected to join the event, chosen based on the information they enter into an online form that asks for photographs, their body type, and their level of activity in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The women who make it through, the company advertises, will be treated to a night of dinner and entertainment at a private venue, prizes, and the chance to be one of the two women chosen to accompany the millionaire on a private, one-on-one date.
A lot of women, it seems, are willing to give it a shot. After just one weekend, Shurtz says that they’re already up to 329 applicants, almost all of which are from within Utah.
The Bachelor-esque event might sound like a publicity stunt – but the company behind it promises that the mystery millionaire is serious about using it to find love.
Would you go on a date with a man knowing nothing but how much money he has in his wallet?
When they talked about this story on the air, Dave & Dujanovic debated just how important finances are in a relationship. If you missed their conversation live, you can still catch it all – including the interview with Erin Shurtz – on the Dave & Dujanovic podcast.
Dave & Dujanovic can be heard weekdays from 9 a.m. to noon on KSL Newsradio. Users can find the show on the KSL Newsradio website and app, as well as Apple Podcasts and Google Play.
