Advertising revolutionised with the TikTok experience

TikTok captures the world’s creativity and knowledge in bite-size form

Over the past few years, content-sharing platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram have become fertile ground for brands to scale their marketing efforts. However, the recent soaring popularity of TikTok has inspired marketers to regard it as a potent advertising arena compared to the rest.

Fast food chain Lotteria is one of the latest to launch a campaign, which in the summer targeted TikTok’s user base. Using their popular hashtag challenge ad unit, the brand unveiled its #mozzaria campaign, encouraging users to create upbeat and visually compelling videos to attract viewers. The campaign aimed to promote Lotteria’s “endless cheese” theme for its new hamburger product.

After only six days, Lotteria’s campaign went viral with nearly 27,000 videos shared, amassing over 19 million views. The company also made efficient use of TikTok’s Brand Takeover ads and in-feed equivalents.

A takeover advert will appear instantly when a user opens the app, while in-feed adverts are native ads placed in the feed of TikTok as part of the video queue. With these methods, Lotteria has increased its visibility by 50 per cent and improved click rates for their advertisements to 11.5 per cent.

Another brand, Cocoxim, has also been successful in attracting millions of users after launching its #saycocoxim challenge on TikTok this year. The challenge encouraged users to post videos with special dance moves with emphasis on using bright green colours throughout. After only two days, Cocoxim attained around 20 million ad impressions. Meanwhile, click rates for its advertisement reached 12 per cent.

Other brands have also capitalised on the viral nature of the TikTok platform, from Vietnamese telecoms giant Viettel to American makeup mainstay Maybelline.

Marketing on TikTok is helping brands to save a great deal of time, money, and effort when compared with other types of campaign. Famous brands like Oreo and Pizza Hut have teamed up with TikTok and achieved unprecedented success as a result. Likewise, big names like Michael Kors, Airbnb, Chevrolet, Dior, and Adidas have used the applications’ adverts to promote products in unique and visually compelling campaigns.

With a large number of daily active users, TikTok presents an enormous opportunity for advertisers. The visual app – which allows users to edit and share short videos with built-in filters, effects, and music – has shaken up the marketing world, presents several innovative advertising solutions to help brands drive engagement and business results.

As a short video platform, TikTok does not encourage brands to cram content in the videos to garner viewers. Instead, a takeover advert will appear in only five seconds to capture the attention of users. If users want to explore and join the campaign, they can click on the ad which will be redirected to an internal or external link, in the form of either a hashtag on the app, or an external brand website.

In addition, brands can partner with TikTok’s marketing team to create a sponsored challenge or other exclusive effects that encourage users to share content on TikTok on the brands’ behalf. With these tools, users can join forces with brands to spread campaigns and in this way users become part of the campaign, and actively become part of the campaign, instead of passively absorbing ads as regular viewers.

With new emerging solutions a core part of the business, TikTok also gives advice to brands on how to deliver content and build hashtag challenges in order to reach their media and advertising goals.

TikTok’s core audience is Generation Z, commonly regarded as people born after the mid-1990s. Surveys have found that this age group on average spends around eight seconds paying attention to videos before moving on, and only trust the values of the brands based on practical actions. Therefore, the mobile video app has emerged as a lucrative platform for both brands and marketers.