The power of TikTok: Here’s what brands need to know
A new force in the realm of social media has arisen called TikTok and brands should take notice.
For those of you that have somehow managed to miss the latest craze, TikTok is a social media video app where users create and post 15 or 60-second videos. The mobile platform, favoured largely by 16 to 24-year-olds, has taken the world by storm and continues to gain increasing popularity as users post responses to a variety of TikTok challenges.
Since its international launch in September 2017, TikTok has grown at a rapid pace. And the numbers associated with TikTok’s meteoric rise are remarkable. Having originated in China, the app is now available to download in 155 countries. Globally, the app has been installed more than 1.4 billion times. TikTok now has in excess of half a billion active users worldwide and daily video views are reported to have breached the one million mark. Clearly, this video app is a force to be reckoned with.
Possibilities for brands
TikTok’s explosive growth has caught the attention of brands and agencies alike, all eager to check out the advertising possibilities. And at TikTok’s recent marketing conference in Singapore, the company unveiled a whole host of advertising possibilities, including: Branded takeover Often in conjunction with sponsored hashtags, brands can also choose a branded takeover that serves users with a few seconds of branded content when they open the app. In-app commerce One of TikTok’s recent new features is the in-app commerce feature, which now allows brands to directly sell products to users without them having to leave the app. In-video ads Perhaps the most direct way to interact with audiences on TikTok, in-video ads allow brands to advertise with full-screen ads that users see when browsing video posts on the app. However, with one swipe ads are dismissed. Sponsored hashtag Currently one of the most popular ways for brands to advertise on TikTok, brands can pay to create their own unique challenge with a sponsored hashtag. As users generate content in response to the challenge, the hashtag gains popularity, with brand engagement and exposure also increasing. As an additional benefit, brands also gain exposure from featuring on TikTok’s ‘Discover’ page.When AF created TikTok’s first ever branded takeover with Nike
Earlier this year, Nike reached out to us with a unique challenge; get 150,000 young Milanese women moving by using social, in a way that would cement the brand’s status as the champion of women in sport on every level. The ask was a specific response to Italy’s significant problem with its perception of sportswomen, who are rarely seen or celebrated. And when they are, they’re stereotyped, sexualised and objectified. In Milan – a key Nike city – 55% of women between 14 and 24 don’t do any sport at all. After all, why would they, when female sporting heroes are either invisible, objectified or vilified as unfeminine? Our research suggested that young women were doing sports, just not in the public places you’d expect. What we uncovered was that young women were active on TikTok, a safe place where they were challenging one another to perform intricate dance routines. So, in response to Nike’s challenge, we set about creating a campaign called Stop At Nothing, the platform’s first branded takeover where we paired real Nike athletes with TikTok influencers to create sports-inspired dance moves that leveraged the power of TikTok’s engagement and user-generated content to get young women moving again. Read more about how we brought Stop At Nothing to life.
