Mondelēz International’s Nutter Butter went viral with a disturbing, surreal crime scene of smeared peanut butter and broken cookies. Language-learning app Duolingo‘s green owl twerked for millions of followers and flirted with pop star Dua Lipa. Mars pet food brand Sheba pitted cats against each other in a race to lick gravy.
All of these marketing moments—more like “anti-marketing,” according to SS+K chief creative officer Stevie Archer—happened on TikTok, where experimental, entertaining, and sometimes absurdist content has found room to flourish.
The only way for brands to play in the space has been to have a point of view and ditch the old rules.
Even as TikTok has now been banned in the U.S., ad industry leaders say that the style of marketing born on the platform isn’t just a flash in the pan. Whether or not TikTok lives on in the States, it has irrevocably changed how advertisers behave and how people expect brands to communicate with them.
“We wouldn’t have seen this acceleration to experiment and take risks [among brands] without TikTok,” Thomas Walters, founder and Europe CEO of global influencer marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy, told ADWEEK. “That’s a permanent change.”
TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, arrived in the U.S. in 2018 and exploded in popularity during the pandemic. Since the start of 2020, the percentage of U.S. adults who use TikTok several times per day has climbed from 4% to 20%, according to Morning Consult. Around 50% of the American population now uses the app.
TikTok hooked users with an endless swipe of short-form videos and a highly personalized algorithm, but it’s also “hard to understate the impact it’s had on creativity,” Walters said. The platform has democratized creativity by providing an accessible tool for people to produce content from anywhere and amass huge audiences.
“It’s really empowered the creator economy, this idea that anybody can make brilliant content as long as you have a point of view and a phone,” said Matthew Henry, innovation lead at AMV BBDO.
Brands as entertainers
As the creator economy blossomed, breaking down the barriers to content creation and audience building, the traditional advertising model—whereby a brand pays to interrupt consumers with a message—continued to weaken.
In the early days of social media, advertisers would “try to get their branding across in the first three seconds and almost trick consumers into thinking that what we were selling them wasn’t an ad,” Henry said. “Because of that, there was a huge amount of negative sentiment towards brands on social, and those that had followings were sort of screaming into a void.”
TikTok flipped that paradigm. Unlike other social media that emphasizes connections or follower counts, TikTok’s algorithm prioritizes entertainment. That means for brands to stand out, they have to act more like “an entertainment company,” Henry said.
“Brands are showing up [on TikTok] among some of the most random and brilliant things in the world, not in the context of other ads in an ad break,” he explained.
Competing for eyeballs in an environment known for dance videos, comedy sketches, and tutorials has spurred many brands “to be riskier with the type of content they produce and try new things,” with some “leaning into the surreal nature of content popular on TikTok,” Walters said.
Chipotle, which challenged fans to dance to the viral “Guacamole Song,” and Duolingo, whose cheeky, dancing owl became Internet famous, were early TikTok adopters that ventured into unexpected and sometimes bizarre territory. But it worked—especially in appealing to Gen Z.
@duolingo UN OR UNE I’M SCARED #duolingo #languagelearning ♬ som original – ✩
Take Nutter Butter. The 55 year-old cookie brand grew a cult following on TikTok with strange, fever-dreamlike posts that sometimes confused its own social media team. Zach Poczekaj, social media manager at the brand’s agency, Dentsu Creative, told The New York Times in October: “If a piece of content makes too much sense, it doesn’t perform as well.”
@officialnutterbutter come play,
♬ original sound – nutter butter
Niche and extreme
Not all brands have taken such an offbeat approach to TikTok. But across the board, the most successful brands on the platform are those that take cues from creators, mimicking their personal tones and narrative styles, said Jimmy George, strategy director at Mischief @ No Fixed Address.
TikTok “changed storytelling to be more kinetic, extreme, and hyperbolic,” and savvy brands followed suit, he observed. For example, in 2021, skincare brand Eos, a Mischief client, named a new shaving cream “Bless Your F*ing Cooch,” after a viral TikTok tutorial about grooming with Eos’ product.
@killljoyy ♬ original sound – killjoy
Unfiltered and lo-fi content thrives on TikTok, in contrast to the polished aesthetic of Instagram or big-budget advertising. As a result, brands that were used to big studios or teams crafting their creative have struggled to break through on the platform.
“That type of content is being drowned out by all this other content that feels personal. If you’re not making that, suddenly you look like the other,” George said.
Because TikTok’s algorithm emphasizes engagement over follower count, it’s allowed niche voices to break through. That’s enabled smaller brands like Scrub Daddy, which built a character around its signature yellow sponge, to build large audiences “if the content is good,” said Rahul Titus, global head of influence at Ogilvy.
TikTok has also forced brands to shift their influencer marketing strategies away from major celebrity influencers and toward creators with smaller, engaged followings. For example, Jools Lebron, the TikTok creator who went from obscurity to viral fame after spawning last year’s “demure” trend, inked deals with brands including Verizon, Lyft, and Netflix.
Numerous brands have stepped outside their typical audience groups to reach communities with niche interests who found homes on TikTok. In 2022, for example, Gucci went beyond high fashion by collaborating with TikTok trainspotter Francis Bourgeois.
And for last year’s Super Bowl, CeraVe partnered with actor Michael Cera—who is not on social media—and influencers outside of skincare, like podcaster Bobbi Althoff, to build buzz weeks before its ad even aired.
Moving at breakneck speed
The ability to go viral on TikTok instantaneously has led to an endless cycle of fleeting trends that marketers must keep pace with by speeding up the creation process significantly.
“The hype cycle got faster and faster,” Archer said. Over a handful of weeks last year, Brat Summer gave way to Demure Fall, forcing brands from Verizon to Zillow to move at breakneck speed to produce relevant TikTok content.
To enable this faster way of working, Henry said he and his AMV BBDO colleagues set up WhatsApp groups with their clients and corporate affairs teams “to be able to react to something in two hours versus two weeks.”
“[Before TikTok], brands’ systems were a bit slower, and there was a lower threshold of risk that they were willing to tolerate,” Walters said. “[Since TikTok], a lot of brands and CMOs have loosened up and put more trust in their teams.”
Now that the Supreme Court has upheld the ban, some marketers overwhelmed by the pace and amount of content they need to feed a presence on TikTok may breathe a “sigh of relief,” Walters said.
Yet the changes propelled by the platform have permanently altered the marketing landscape, experts say. Competitors like Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts have risen in response to its short-form video format, further entrenching the consumer behavior TikTok built.
“TikTok can be replaced [by other platforms], but it’s like Pandora’s Box—it’s been opened and now it doesn’t really matter,” George said. “TikTok has created an expectation for a certain type of content.”
“The masses have influenced brands, and now people have experienced how they can truly interact with brands in the way they like,” Henry added. “That’s not going to change.”
This story was updated on Friday, Jan. 17 to reflect the Supreme Court’s ruling.
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