ABOUT EVAN: LinkedIn  | Twitter | Movers+Shakers




ABOUT ROCKETSHIP HQ: Website | LinkedIn  | Twitter | YouTube

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🎶 TikTok is about musical storytelling

🤗 How Movers+Shakers embraced TikTok

🧝‍♀️ The e.l.f. campaign was the biggest campaign in US TikTok history for quite some time

🎼 How the original song for the e.l.f. campaign hit #4 on Spotify’s global viral chart

🎺 The chart-topping brand anthem that played before NBA games

🧑‍🎤 Original music was ground-breaking in the beginning

📖 No brands have any sort of guidelines for music

🆕 The fundamental difference of content creation on TikTok and other platforms

🤯 User-generated content that *also* goes viral is the secret behind the billion+ views

🌟 The e.l.f. campaign had 5 million user generated videos, all of which had the potential to go viral.

🧮 How to count TikTok campaign views

🤖 Understanding the TikTok’s algorithm

🌎 Everyone has their own curated world on TikTok

🌺 How organics factors into performance

🎉 It is possible to architect virality

🧪 Science vs. art in brand campaigns

🍳 The recipe for architecting a viral challenge

🎰 The levers to pull after launching a campaign

💰 Allocation of TikTok budgets

📺 Media products on TikTok exist

🧬 Virality is not a guaranteed outcome

📍 The huge potential of the ad placement on the Discover page

⏳ It is early days for quantitative modelling

🎨 Influencer selection is an art

🎭 How to frame a narrative arc in 15-seconds

🎬 5 questions to ask when getting started on TikTok

⛔ All brands are not a fit for the platform 

💫 Brand strategy has to intersect with the type of content on TikTok to achieve success

🔑 Consistent content is key

🙋 TikTok also offers direct response campaigns

KEY QUOTES

How Movers+Shakers embraced TikTok

When TikTok started to develop as a platform, it was interesting to us for those two reasons. It was a very joyful place. And it was all about musical storytelling. And that was just something that resonated with the way that we were already using joy and music to help brands cut through the clutter on social.

No brands have guidelines for music

It’s also scary for brand managers, because very few of them have ever created branded music before. They might have a 300-page brand book, but it doesn’t mention music. I’ve never seen a brand book mention music. 

The power of user-generated content

When we make a video for YouTube or Instagram, that video could go viral. That video could get millions or tens of millions of views. But there’s a whole extra dimension that TikTok adds, where it’s not just that video that can go viral, but we can start a snowball of viral video creation on TikTok. 

When we talk about that e.l.f. example, it was 5 million user generated videos. So it wasn’t just one video that could go viral; now we have 5 million and every single one of those could potentially go viral. And that’s how you get these billion-view campaigns, because that’s all the views on all of those videos.

The math behind the billions of views

The way that those numbers are counted is you add up all of the views on all of those videos that use the campaign hashtag. That’s how you get to that billion number.

How to architect potentially viral campaigns

There’s a bunch of money spent jumpstarting them—low to mid to high six figures, depending on how we architect it. That gives it the push out of the gate, and then we see a huge range and performance in these types of campaigns. And that range is driven, as you said, really by the organic pickup and the algorithm—and the algorithm is just a reflection of the organic pick up. If people are really into the challenge that we’ve designed, then it’s going to go really, really high.

The primary consideration before adopting TikTok

The first thing: just making sure there’s alignment and then thinking about how we develop the challenge concept. What are we inviting people to do? And we design that around the brand: the DNA of the brand, the value, the vibe, the energy of the brand, as well as any specific product or aspects of the brand that we’re including. 

How to pick influencers

There’s people on TikTok who are known for sparking trends—it’s very different and it’s not necessarily the same people from the people who you’d hire for a product campaign. But we recruit a cadre of influencers to help kick off the campaign; just show that this party has started. 

There is no formula for virality

Brands will call us and they’ll say, “Hey, we want that again. Can you make us go viral, so that we have this big sales lift?” 

That, I don’t know how to do. The unpredictability of social media is that things actually just do go viral on their own. What we do is a type of calculated virality, to your point, there is quite a structure and process around that and it has a lot of moving parts. Namely, a bunch of influencers that we hire to really get something jump started and often a big media component as well.

TikTok’s hashtag challenges explained

That hashtag challenge is a product that TikTok sells. This is how you get into the billions of views. It’s a very unusual media product, but it basically means that you get placement on their Discover page. 

So for those of you who aren’t familiar with TikTok, there’s one main page in the app where you see what’s trending today and they’ll put the branded challenge on that page. And they’ll also create a landing page for you, where all the videos of anybody who’s joining your challenge will be all aggregated, curated, actually, and sorted on that landing page.

It is possible to scale back spend

You can scale back the ad budget actually all the way to zero. Our smaller challenges, which we call organic challenges, have no ad spend, but they just use the power of the influencers reach and the cool factor of the music to carry the challenge forward. And that means that the influencer selection is a little bit deeper and even more critical.

How to build a narrative arc for 15 seconds

We actually architect this and we script it this way, both when we’re developing the music and when we’re briefing the influencer. Part one is you’re sitting there in your plain clothes, and you just look bored every day. Part two, somebody from off screen throws you an Amazon box. We figured everybody has one laying around and you catch it. Part three, there’s a transition—and you hear that in the music—the music changes and all of a sudden you are glammed up in your holiday pyjamas. The music changes in this moment to become a sort of techno beat, where you are doing a catwalk actually.

How to build for TikTok

TikTok is different. The visual aesthetic is different, the storytelling styles are different, the themes of the conversation are different, and the audience is different. And so finding that sweet spot and overlap between what’s true and authentic to the brand, and what is organic and natural to the TikTok community. Where is that point of overlap?

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Shamanth: I’m very excited to welcome Evan Horowitz to the Mobile User Acquisition Show. Evan, welcome to the show.

Evan: Thank you. Great to be here.

Shamanth: Evan, I’m very thrilled to have you because certainly you guys have done very interesting and amazing things with TikTok, and with virality in ways that I find truly inspiring, truly stunning. We’ll dive into a lot of that today; I’m thrilled to get into that. 

A good place to start would be the beginning. The last time we spoke, you said: “About two years ago, nobody knew about TikTok—not even us.” And at the time, what inspired you to look at TikTok as a platform that could have some sort of potential?

Evan: Yeah, so that was back in 2019; Movers+Shakers, we’re a creative agency on a mission to spread joy. Another thing that’s relevant about us, to answer your question, is that we do a lot of storytelling using original music to connect brands to culture. And so

when TikTok started to develop as a platform, it was interesting to us for those two reasons. It was a very joyful place. And it was all about musical storytelling. And that was just something that resonated with the way that we were already using joy and music to help brands cut through the clutter on social. 

Our first project on TikTok was with e.l.f. cosmetics, and it was actually their idea. They were interested in TikTok because they love being first to market on new platforms, and actually e.l.f. was already buzzing on TikTok. The hashtag e.l.f. cosmetics had several million views before they had ever entered the platform. But when we looked at it together, we realised that we can figure this platform out pretty quickly. 

That was in the summer of 2019. You could count on one hand how many brands had ever done anything on the platform. So it was pretty uncharted territory for us.

Shamanth: Yeah, so the fact that you guys were very music-driven fit right into what TikTok was all about. And then of course, e.l.f. was a very, very big campaign. Do you want to speak of the kind of metrics that the first campaign of yours did?

Evan: I’ll start at the end. e.l.f. was the biggest campaign in TikTok US history for quite some time, and it achieved a level of virality, both in and off the platform that was just totally unprecedented. With over 5 million user generated videos—5 million people creating videos to join the campaign—billions and billions and billions of views, and more than that, the original song that we wrote went massively viral in the music world. It hit number four on Spotify’s global viral chart; it was in the top 50 from Australia to the Netherlands. E-L-F is eyes-lips-face—that was what the whole campaign was a recognition thing around it, because people don’t know E-L-F stands for eyes-lips-face. So the eyes-lips-face brand anthem ended up being played at NBA stadiums to hype up the crowd before games. 

It’s funny because when we first started working with TikTok to create that campaign, we said we were going to do an original song and they said, “No, no, you don’t do that. You licence an existing hit song. That’s how these campaigns are run.” And we said, “Well, we really like writing original branded music. Movers+Shakers are really good at that.” And so they said, “Okay, we’ll see how it goes.” And now that’s the playbook. Pretty much every big campaign now, it’s just obvious and the standard that you would create original branded music for it. But at that time, it was not recommended.

Shamanth: Wow. Very cool. I definitely have had first hand experience of how protective a lot of brand managers can be around their brand. So it’s amazing that you guys produced something that was cool with them, but also produced the kind of results that it did.

Evan: Yeah, well, it’s always a challenge. A lot of brands come to us because they’re really attracted to our ability to help them connect to culture through music. But

it’s also scary for brand managers, because very few of them have ever created branded music before. They might have a 300-page brand book, but it doesn’t mention music. I’ve never seen a brand book mention music. 

But fortunately, Movers+Shakers, we have a process that we take our clients through that really helps them figure out, and us figure out with them, what musical chapter of their brand book would look like, and then how to actually put that into practice. And it’s actually super fun.

Shamanth: Indeed, perhaps a topic for our next episode. But for now, I’d love to dive into what made that campaign—and a lot of other campaigns you’ve done—really take off. 

So, in what fundamental ways is TikTok’s algorithm or virality different from the way things go viral on Instagram, SnapChat, YouTube or Facebook or what have you?

Evan: Yeah, there’s one main fundamental difference in virality on TikTok versus other platforms, and that’s that on those platforms, as a creative agency,

when we make a video for YouTube or Instagram, that video could go viral. That video could get millions or tens of millions of views. But there’s a whole extra dimension that TikTok adds, where it’s not just that video that can go viral, but we can start a snowball of viral video creation on TikTok. 

When we talk about that e.l.f. example, it was 5 million user generated videos. So it wasn’t just one video that could go viral; now we have 5 million and every single one of those could potentially go viral. And that’s how you get these billion-view campaigns, because that’s all the views on all of those videos.

And this dynamic of a snowball of video creation; it just doesn’t exist on any other platform. 

That is just the norm on TikTok, there’s always trends that are happening on TikTok—not related to brands, most of them. But, all of a sudden, everyone’s making a video about this, or everybody’s making a video with that song, or everybody’s telling this type of story. And people just jump in, and they create their own videos. And that’s why now brands can start these trends, and you can unleash a snowball of people making a commercial for you, which is just totally crazy.

Shamanth: Which is just insane; which can get onto Spotify’s worldwide charts. I think a lot of people, myself included, don’t quite appreciate how that snowball effect really happens. 

Which brings me to my next question: a lot of your campaigns have billions of views. And across all your campaigns, you’ve got, I believe, 90 billion views. That’s a ‘B’, and we will very likely have the word ‘billions’ somewhere in the headline of this episode. Given there are like 6 billion people on earth, help us understand how the math behind that works.

Evan: Yeah, people are watching a lot of TikTok; I guess that’s the takeaway. We ran a campaign with Amazon recently, I think it got 7 billion views.

The way that those numbers are counted is you add up all of the views on all of those videos that use the campaign hashtag. That’s how you get to that billion number.

So it’s the cumulative amount of all of those views together.

Shamanth: Understood. So if you had 5 million user generated videos, each of those could have like a 1000 views each—1000 or 10,000 or a 100,000 views—all of that cumulatively gets into the billions. 

Evan: Exactly. And to your point about how many people on the planet, obviously, every single one of those people didn’t see our challenge, but that’s the nature of these trends on TikTok is that you see a lot of them from the same trend. And actually, the TikTok algorithm knows once you start liking a trend, they will keep showing you a bunch from that trend. 

If we look at the Amazon challenge, we wrote this song called Pyjama Jam. It was before the holidays, and it was just about rocking out in your holiday pjs; it was super fun. A given person probably saw 5-10-20 different Pyjama Jam videos, over the course of a few weeks during the campaign. And so that person counted for many, many views, just that one person. 

Which is what you want as the brand, right? You want people to just keep seeing your brand coming through their feed. That’s exactly what’s so cool about this is that Amazon got to come through that person’s feed, let’s say 20 times, but each time was through a different video that was created by a member of the general public.

Shamanth: Yeah, that’s a brand’s dream right? Be omnipresent.

Evan: It does drive measurable brand lift, which is pretty amazing.

Shamanth: It sounds like a lot of that is aided by the TikTok algorithm. Right? If a user is really engaging with three of your Amazon videos, the TikTok algorithm just shows a whole lot of them. Can you speak to how the algorithm plays into all of this?

Evan: The TikTok algorithm is very smart. It’s one of the reasons why TikTok has just taken off faster than any social app in history. It really does get to know you and what you’re interested in. In fact, if you look at my TikTok feed and we look at your TikTok feed, you’re going to think we’re on different apps, because it really does push you into a world that is going to be unique to you and curated for you. 

For example, I’m not a pet person. I didn’t grow up with pets; I’m still a little scared of dogs. I don’t really see any pets on my TikTok feed. But lots of people see tons of dogs, puppies, or cats, or rabbits or whatever they’re into; it’s just a whole different world that they’re in. 

So when you’re a brand and you’re starting a trend, and people start liking and watching your trend, the algorithm is going to show them more things from your trend. And that’s really cool. And that also tends to help you connect with your target audience too. Because in general, when we’re creating and we’re architecting one of these trends or challenges, we’re thinking about who’s the target audience that we really want to get excited by this, and those people will tend to get served a lot more of our campaign videos.

Shamanth: Right. So it sounds like a lot of what you’re doing is getting a campaign to that tipping point, where the algorithm takes over and that snowballing effect really starts to kick in.

Evan: That’s a great way to put it. Yeah, because it really is like spinning up the flywheel. Obviously, these campaigns are not truly viral, in the sense that

there’s a bunch of money spent jumpstarting them—low to mid to high six figures, depending on how we architect it. That gives it the push out of the gate, and then we see a huge range and performance in these types of campaigns. And that range is driven, as you said, really by the organic pickup and the algorithm—and the algorithm is just a reflection of the organic pick up. If people are really into the challenge that we’ve designed, then it’s going to go really, really high.

We see a lot of brands launch campaigns that unfortunately were kind of lame, and you can see that when you look at them. You can still spend a ton of money on the media buy, but it’s not gonna really trend very much. So that’s where the creative, the challenge, the design, the music are all so important.

Shamanth: Yeah. And what I find impressive about you guy’s work is, you have a process to very consistently architect virality—and I have heard you use the word ‘process’ at least a couple of times today on this interview—and that process has, relatively consistently, gotten a lot of brands to a billion views within 24 to 48 hours. So what does that process look like? And what would you say are the building blocks of a campaign like this?

Evan: Yeah, I guess I’m very process-oriented. The first time we did it, when we go back to the e.l.f. campaign, we’re just feeling our way through it. Now we’ve run so many of these massively viral TikTok challenges that we really have gotten it much closer to a science; there’s still a lot of artistry in it. 

It starts with the brand and their objectives. Different brands come to this type of campaign for different reasons. In fact, we turn away and discourage a lot of people from doing this type of campaign. There are many ways for brands to play on TikTok and social in general, and sometimes people start asking us: “Well, we want that big viral TikTok campaign.” There’s reasons why it’s not a good fit for a lot of brands or a lot of types of campaigns. 

So that’s

the first thing: just making sure there’s alignment and then thinking about how we develop the challenge concept. What are we inviting people to do? And we design that around the brand: the DNA of the brand, the value, the vibe, the energy of the brand, as well as any specific product or aspects of the brand that we’re including. 

Once we’ve decided what the challenge is then we go right into architecting the music, and those two really go hand in hand. The music really supports the challenge, and it’s really the canvas on which you paint the challenge. So it’s totally different. Music on TikTok—whether it’s a challenge or just a post that we make for a brand’s channel—music is integral to the storytelling; much more so than on other platforms. On other platforms, you can just throw on some background music onto a good spot and then you’ll be fine, but here, when we architect the music, we’re actually planning second by second, for those 15 seconds of the TikTok, what that will be and we’re writing the music to have a narrative arc that supports that. So that’s the second big step. 

Once we’ve finished that, we go into working with our influencers. Because there’s always a cadre of influencers who we recruit and we select very strategically.

There’s people on TikTok who are known for sparking trends—it’s very different and it’s not necessarily the same people from the people who you’d hire for a product campaign. But we recruit a cadre of influencers to help kick off the campaign; just show that this party has started. 

And then once we have all that together, we’re ready to put it out into the world and launch. At that point, it’s just crazy, because as soon as we launch, and then you just keep hitting refresh, refresh, refresh, and you see the views go up and up and up. It’s totally wild.

Shamanth: Yeah, crazy. I like how structured that process is, to the extent that you could call it very consistent across brands—you could apply to every brand. I’m curious, so what happens after that last stage that you described? You go launch; what does that look like?

Evan: Well, it’s interesting because, to some extent, you just sit back and watch—much more so than other campaigns, I suppose, where so much of the work is after launch. Here, actually, most of the work is before launch, which is interesting, but you just start to see it go. There are levers that we can pull once it launches to help steer it—we can add firepower with more media, we can add more influencers—but largely, it’s just a leap of faith when you hit go.

Shamanth: Yeah, what are some the levers that you can pull after a campaign like this is live?

Evan: The main thing is adding fuel to the fire. When we work with our clients, sometimes you do that because it campaigns not quite as big as we want it to be. So we’ll recruit more influencers, we can add more media to get more reach for the sponsored content. Other times we actually have campaigns that are going so big, that’s when our clients will unlock even more budget because they realise that we’ve hit gold. And so, we’ve dumped another hundreds of thousands of dollars into more and bigger influencers, let’s say, just make the trend seem and become even bigger after launch just because we see it and say: “Wow, this is gonna be huge. Let’s make it really huge!”

Shamanth: Yeah, right? If it’s going big, why not go bigger? One common misconception that a lot of people would have would be, “Oh, why do you need budgets for something like TikTok?” I mean, a lot of people might wonder and ask, “Why don’t we just make this amazing viral video or start this trend and just leave it out there? Why do we need budgets at all?” How would you answer that question?

Evan: It’s a good question. A lot of brands first call Movers+Shakers because they’ve seen stockouts on one of their products and they didn’t know why. And then their intern sent them a TikTok or something that had gone viral about their product that had led to stockouts. And that happens quite a bit actually. I could give you many anecdotes, where that’s happened. So then those

brands will call us and they’ll say, “Hey, we want that again. Can you make us go viral, so that we have this big sales lift?” 

That, I don’t know how to do. The unpredictability of social media is that things actually just do go viral on their own. What we do is a type of calculated virality, to your point, there is quite a structure and process around that and it has a lot of moving parts. Namely, a bunch of influencers that we hire to really get something jump started and often a big media component as well.

And that’s where the budget comes in.

Shamanth: What does that media component look like? For somebody that’s completely uninitiated to TikTok, what does that look like?

Evan: There’s levels of it. I’ll start at the big side of it. So all the headlines that you read about Movers+Shakers campaigns? These are official hashtag challenges.

That hashtag challenge is a product that TikTok sells. This is how you get into the billions of views. It’s a very unusual media product, but it basically means that you get placement on their Discover page. 

So for those of you who aren’t familiar with TikTok, there’s one main page in the app where you see what’s trending today and they’ll put the branded challenge on that page. And they’ll also create a landing page for you, where all the videos of anybody who’s joining your challenge will be all aggregated, curated, actually, and sorted on that landing page.

And that’s this hashtag challenge product, which gives you a lot of premium placement in the app. 

We usually bundle that with some other ad products: often a top view, which is the first ad that you see when you open TikTok, a very powerful ad unit. And then a lot of just typical infeed ads to help support around that. So that creates this big architecture of visibility and push out of the gate that, to our discussion from a few minutes ago, is a jumpstart to you getting going. That’s on the big end of the ad spend. And that is what all these big headline grabbing challenges are doing. 

On the low end,

you can scale back the ad budget actually all the way to zero. Our smaller challenges, which we call organic challenges, have no ad spend, but they just use the power of the influencers reach and the cool factor of the music to carry the challenge forward. And that means that the influencer selection is a little bit deeper and even more critical.

The original music that we’ll create is also extremely important. You can scale in between those levels of media spend.

Shamanth: Right, and you could also treat what you’re paying the influencers as media spend; many companies do do that. That’s very helpful to know and understand because, again, you do need to put dollars behind that.

Evan: I’m not smart enough to know how to do it truly organically and virally. I don’t know how to do that yet. Not to say we don’t have normal videos go viral—that happens too. We run the brand channels on TikTok, as well as other platforms, for many of our clients. And for sure, when we’re posting constantly— which we do for these channels that we’re running—some of them do go viral and they’ll get hundreds or thousands or millions of views. But also that? We don’t know how to predict. It’s also a numbers game, just because the volume of content allows us to keep spinning the wheel.

Shamanth: Absolutely. And you have a process. Oftentimes the outcome is directionally there, but whether the outcome is billions or not; that’s not always in your control.

Evan: That’s true. Yeah, it’s still a big range. Even with Movers+Shakers campaigns, which I can honestly say are some of the best performing on TikTok, we still have a huge range on the outcomes that we see. 

Shamanth: Certainly. Just to dig into the media spend a bit more—the hashtag challenge, which is the product that TikTok sells. What sort of budgets would somebody need to be able to get that?

Evan: All in that type of campaign is in the mid to high six figures typically, and that’s covering your media spend—that’s the biggest chunk—influencer spends, creative and music fees. Those are sort of the main buckets there.

Shamanth: Understood. Is that ad auction-driven? Or you get the complete ownership of that ad placement? What is it like?

Evan: It’s a fixed price. So it’s not an auction, it’s all through reservation. TikTok’s schedule is pretty crowded, so you have to reserve space ahead of time. They keep changing the structure of it so I won’t get into all the nuances. But in general, you do get 100% share of that placement that you’re buying. So it’s a very powerful visibility tool.

Shamanth: It’s like the front page of Yahoo! used to be 20 years ago, I guess.

Evan: Yeah, exactly. But with the opportunity to spawn user generated creation, which Yahoo could never do.

Shamanth: Exactly. Yeah, I totally get it. You spoke of the kind of planning process that goes in: right from selecting influencers, making the music, figuring out what the right sort of brand messaging needs to be. You spoke of all of these components. What sort of quantitative planning goes into a campaign? So, is there some sort of quantitative model that says, “Let’s go to 10 influencers; each of them have 10 million views, so we think mathematically, we should get to 500 million based on this calculation.” So is there some sort of modelling? If at all, there is something like that that you do have?

Evan: We don’t have that, no; that would be cool. The sample size is still not big enough. I mean, even running dozens of campaigns, the variance is so big and the amount of variables is so big also. There’s so many factors: the size and the type of the media spend; the size and the type of the influencers; not to mention what is the challenge; what’s the brand. Some brands are just a lot easier to promote, frankly, than others. So we don’t have enough data to do any modelling.

That’s why it is much more, I think, on the artistry side. We just have a sense and an intuition based on all the campaigns that we’ve run, all the things that we see happening. Influencers are big, to your point. But a lot of that is more to seeing who’s trending in which subcultures and that’s very qualitative. So I have a big team that just has their ears to the ground on TikTok and other platforms, to see who are those up and coming creators that are relevant, but in which markets. If we’re doing a beauty challenge, it’s going to be very different from a retailer, let’s say. Or we’re trying to reach a Gen Z guy versus a millennial mom: very different influencer selection. So that’s where a lot more qualitative artistry, I guess, comes into it.

Shamanth: Yeah. What I’m hearing you imply is that the quality and the fit of the influencer and their ability to spark a trend matters far more than their reach, per se. Would that be accurate? 

Evan: That’s true, yeah, especially with the paid challenges, where you have a big media spend, because the media spend gives you a lot of reach. So there, the influencer selection is more about the fit, I think—to your point; it is a good word—and just showing to the right people that you’re trying to reach that: “Hey, this is cool. This is happening.” It’s just different selection criteria for an influencer, then a traditional influencer campaign. And that requires a lot of training to our clients, actually, to help get them into this new mindset, as well as for the influencers—because the influencers are used to doing a certain type of work—that this is very different. And so we need to retrain the influencers as well.

Shamanth: Yeah, certainly. Again, could be a topic for our next podcast. It’s always a good sign when I hear something like that, and think we need to revisit this. We will put this on the list, Evan. 

To keep going on our current theme, I want to pick up on two phrases that you used earlier: one is storytelling; the other, within that context, is the narrative arc. Tell me more about how you think about these in the context of a 15-second video. And I also ask this because, in my experience, it’s been my impression that ‘storytelling’ can be a bit of a buzzword. So tell me more about how you think about this and what this can look like in a TikTok context.

Evan: Yeah, yeah. It’s interesting. So one thing that’s different about TikTok—Movers+Shakers works across all social, so our approach is different depending on the platform of course. If you look at Instagram, which probably is still the biggest, most important platform, the storytelling is very simplistic and it’s still mostly stills. Even if you look at an Insta story, often there’s not a full story. It’s more just a little glimpse of something. 

On TikTok, first of all, it’s all video. And even though they’re only 15 seconds, most TikToks still have a sense of a beginning, middle and end; they do tell a story. And so when we talk about what’s the story of this campaign, or this challenge that we’re running, we actually are planning a narrative arc, even though it’s only typically 15 seconds long. 

I’ll give you a couple examples. I mentioned the Amazon Pyjama Jam that you can find on TikTok #pyjama jam. This was a challenge that we ran around Black Friday, Amazon wanted to promote their fashion in general, and specifically as a destination for holiday. So we did this thing about holiday pyjamas. 

There were three parts of the story.

We actually architect this and we script it this way, both when we’re developing the music and when we’re briefing the influencer. Part one is you’re sitting there in your plain clothes, and you just look bored every day. Part two, somebody from off screen throws you an Amazon box. We figured everybody has one laying around and you catch it. Part three, there’s a transition—and you hear that in the music—the music changes and all of a sudden you are glammed up in your holiday pyjamas. The music changes in this moment to become a sort of techno beat, where you are doing a catwalk actually.

So part three is you do a runway catwalk, as if you were in a fashion show, but in your holiday PJs, which is just super fun and silly and people loved it. But the music now sounds like you’re on Project Runway or something. 

And so, that’s how even though all I have is 15 seconds, there’s still part one, part two, part three of the video.

Shamanth: Yeah, it’s a microcosm of a transformation. There’s a transformation that happens within 15 seconds. And I love how you describe that process itself. Even though it’s 15 seconds, clearly a lot of thinking and planning has gone into that. So thank you for sharing that example because it illustrates so clearly how universal some of these principles are.

Evan: Sometimes the stories are simpler; we do a lot of dance challenges, those are still really popular. There it’s about setting up the choreography, which still has steps in the choreography. We did a challenge for the Scooby Doo movie that launched last summer. And we hired a really popular choreographer on TikTok, when we worked with her to develop that arc of the challenge that mirror this song that we had written where you actually hear Scooby’s voice. So it was less like a beginning, middle and end, and more like a fun dance that still has a sort of arc to it.

Shamanth: Yeah, we’ve talked about this process that’s very consistently worked across brands. Certainly, there’s a range of outcomes, as you have added the caveat, but you have the ingredients for executing wider campaigns. Is there an example of a campaign that you thought had all the ingredients for going big, but didn’t? And, just as important, is this something that you were able to analyse post-hoc and say, “Aha, this is why it didn’t work”?

Evan: Well, we never know; there’s no controlled studies in this sort of thing. Unfortunately, you can’t A/B test. We just launched a campaign last week, actually, with Disney Freeform to support the return of their Grown-ish show, which is a super popular show on TV. We got a bunch of great talent, including a lot of the talent from the cast participating, and it didn’t go nearly as big as we were expecting. And I don’t know why that is, to be honest. We felt like all the ingredients were there, but there’s just a range of outcomes. And that’s just really hard to predict.

Shamanth: Yeah, it can be tricky. Is there a post-mortem process, or is it like: it is what it is?

Evan: We can look at it and speculate, but we can’t draw any firm conclusions unfortunately. We always do a post-mortem. And we always look at how we can get better next time. That’s the same for successful campaigns, as with smaller campaigns. But it is a very organic sort of campaign. It’s just so different from, I think, the quantitative analysis you can do on a more performance marketing campaign. 

Shamanth: Certainly. To switch gears a bit, we’ve talked about a lot of the viral campaigns that you guys have run now, and you very briefly did mention that something you guys also help do is have brands build an organic presence, post organic videos. Now, let’s assume there’s a brand or a product that wants to build an organic presence. They have zero followers; they want to get started. What are some of the most important things they could be doing that you would advise them to do?

Evan: Well, it’s great that they’re getting started, I would say that first. We’re in 2021, TikTok is now officially a mainstream platform. I’ve been sort of tooting the horn about it for a couple of years and it’s no longer optional. I think that’s the first thing to say. So it’s really great that this hypothetical brand is getting themselves off the ground. 

I think there’s a couple steps, and we do this with all of our clients as we help them launch onto this platform in general, and especially as we strategize for creating the new brands channel. 

The first thing is just to look at the environment that they’re entering. And we always do a lot of just landscape analysis of: 

1. Who’s the customer? 
2. What are they seeing and hearing on TikTok? 
3. Why are they there? 
4. What are they looking for? 
5. What’s this world? 

TikTok is actually a huge community of microcosms; ‘niche talk’ is actually a term that TikTok is trying to make a thing. There’s skin talk, there’s car talk—every sort of talk has its own little world. And so we’re looking at the world that we’re entering. 

We’re helping a big global skincare brand enter right now, and so we’re looking at skin talk, we’re looking at beauty talk, we’re looking at wellness talk and trying to understand that landscape. 

The next thing, which is super important is—based on that strategic insight and the knowledge of the brand—how is this brand going to show up on TikTok? And this is a tricky thing. Brands are very clear about how they show up on Instagram or YouTube, but they don’t know how they’re going to show up on TikTok. This is something that we spend a lot of time working through and developing a clear point of view on, because

TikTok is different. The visual aesthetic is different, the storytelling styles are different, the themes of the conversation are different, and the audience is different. And so finding that sweet spot and overlap between what’s true and authentic to the brand, and what is organic and natural to the TikTok community. Where is that point of overlap?

When you enter TikTok and start building organic presence, you want to be really clear on that. 

Once you are, then you just go into the content creation. This is the execution phase, which is of course a continual test and learn. One thing that I would just flag is that consistency is so important. We see a lot of brands who posted five or 10 times on TikTok. They didn’t go viral, and they decided it didn’t work. But the TikTok algorithm is like a lottery and you just do have to keep spinning the wheel. We see that when we’re running a channel for a month, 6 months, 12 months, we get better and better, and we can increase the reach and the hit rate. But it still does just require day in, day out posting lots and lots of content. If you look at the TikTok influencers, they’re doing the same thing. It really is about that consistency. So that would be the three phases that I outline for them.

Shamanth: Yeah, I think that consistency can be underrated by a lot of brands and people. I think it’s more universal than just around branding and TikTok. Certainly, I think the fact that you have to keep posting until, really, it takes off, I think that’s very, very important.

Evan: Yeah, well, and then you still have to keep posting. And it is a big lift; it’s a commitment. And I think that’s why also a lot of companies are hiring us to do that is because they don’t have the bandwidth in house or the expertise. 

It’s also just a different type of content creation. When you create for Instagram, you can do a photoshoot, and you can get dozens of assets in one day that are all in the same world of this photoshoot. Every TikTok is unique. Every TikTok tells its own story; we don’t tend to be in asset buckets. That said, it’s a much lower lift in content creation, because it’s really low-fi production and we’ve gotten really good at this sort of distributed content production, so we can produce it.

Shamanth: Yeah, absolutely. If there’s a brand or product that’s more direct response focused, and they want to see ROIs, are there any learnings from the playbook you described that they might be able to use? Or is that a completely different ball game altogether?

Evan: If we’re just looking at TikTok, as the platform that we’re speaking about now, there’s many ways in on TikTok. And certainly, what we spent most of the time talking about—which is these big viral challenges—is not a direct response type of campaign. There isn’t even a click-through option for the most part—I’m generalising a bit—that’s not what we’re optimising around. Brand channels also, while important to have that organic presence, are not going to drive a lot of traffic to your landing page. 

TikTok does have a traditional ad product. They call it the infeed ad, which is basically the same as a Snap ad or an IG story ad, comes up between organic content. This does have a click out to a landing page or the App Store or wherever you want to send it. This is really where performance marketers spend their time on TikTok. It’s a great ad product. It’s not nearly as developed technically, as Google’s or Facebook’s platforms are—although TikTok is adding new features every month in terms of targeting, segmentation, pixel, third party integrations—but one of the great things about it is that it’s still a lot less crowded than the incumbent platforms. And so the CPMs and things that you get there—I’m sure you can speak more to this than I can—are quite advantageous. And so, for brands that are willing to be a bit more on the cutting edge, you can get a lot of mileage there.

Shamanth: Absolutely. The CPMs are a fraction of what’s on the other channels, it’s still relatively uncrowded, and there’s a lot of potential, even if you don’t want to go the viral route. 

Evan, this has been incredible, as I said earlier, and I’m taking notes and there were at least three different points of time, potentially a couple more when I was like, we need to record a v2 of this podcast. That’s always a great sign of a great podcast, when I have taken that many notes. This is perhaps a good place for us to start to wrap up. But before we do that, can you tell folks how they can find out more about you and everything you do?

Evan: Yeah, my company’s Movers+Shakers. Our website is moversshakers.co: two s’s in the middle. You can email us through our website or at hi [at] movers shakers [dot] co. I’m Evan Horowitz, we can put my LinkedIn in the shownotes. That’s the best place to follow me. I’m always posting about TikTok and digital disruption more generally. So that’s the best place for me personally.

Shamanth: Excellent. And we will link to all of that, Evan, in the show notes. We’ll have a full transcript as well. But for now, thank you so much for being a guest on the Mobile User Acquisition Show.

Evan: Great to be here. I appreciate the invitation and the really fun questions.

Shamanth: Absolutely. Thank you.

Evan: Thank you.

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