Mondelēz International’s Nutter Butter was announced in a tragic, tragic accident of peanut butter panini and broken cookies. Language learning The green owl of Duolingo went live for millions of followers and played with pop star Dua Lipa. Mars pet food brand Sheba pits cats against each other in a gravity-licking race.
All of these marketing moments—like “anti-marketing,” according to SS+K chief creative officer Stevie Archer—happened on TikTok, where they experiment, entertain, and some silly times that gave him the chance to flourish.
The only way for brands to play the game is to have an idea and throw away the old rules.
Even if TikTok is now banned in the US, the leaders of the advertising industry say that the marketing system born on the platform is not just a flash in the pan. Whether TikTok lives or not in the United States, it has irrevocably changed the behavior of the media and the intention of people to connect with them.
“We wouldn’t have seen this rush to try and get involved [among brands] without TikTok,” said Thomas Walters, founder and European CEO of global marketing firm Billion Dollar Boy, to ADWEEK. “That’s a permanent change.”
TikTok, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, arrived in the US in 2018 and increased in popularity during the pandemic. Since the beginning of 2020, the percentage of American adults who use TikTok several times a day has climbed from 4% to 20%, according to Morning Consult. About 50% of the US population now uses the app.
TikTok allows users to use not only short videos with a special algorithm, but it is “difficult to reduce the impact of creativity,” said Walters. The platform has democratized creativity by providing an accessible tool for people to produce content from anywhere and crowdsource.
“The creative economy is really encouraging, this idea that anyone can do amazing things if you have an idea and a phone,” said Matthew Henry, innovation at AMV BBDO.
Branding as entertainment
As the creative economy grows, breaking down barriers to content creation and audience building, the traditional advertising model—which pays a premium—distracts consumers with a message- continued to weaken.
In the early days of social media, advertisers would “try to advertise their brand in the first three seconds and almost fool customers into thinking that what we sold them was not a advertising,” said Henry. “Because of that, there was a lot of negativity about the signs on social media, and those who followed were shouting into a void.”