VOGUE BUSINESS talks to Rachel about the rise of TikTok and Magnetic North's Gen Z Forecast
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Do Fashion Brands Need TikTok?

By Jessica Schiffer

NEW YORK— TikTok is having a moment. The mobile video platform, known for hosting humorous video challenges inspired by hashtags like #PoseChallenge and #OddlySatisfying, has become part of the marketing equation. To speak to the app’s predominantly young user base, brands including Ralph Lauren, MAC and Uniqlo are sponsoring their own challenges to great effect, with views and user participation often significantly exceeding expectations.

Developed by Chinese tech giant Bytedance, the social video app has been downloaded more than 110 million times since its US launch in August 2018. (There have been more than 1 billion global downloads per some estimates.) Forty-one per cent of its audience is between the ages of 16 and 24, according to consumer research firm Magnetic North.

“TikTok is having a moment with brands and marketers because it's having a moment with Gen Z consumers,” says MaryLeigh Bliss, vice president of content at youth marketing consultancy Ypulse. (Bytedance, which is valued at $75 billion, is reportedly eyeing an IPO in Hong Kong.)

But there are outstanding questions about whether its meteoric growth can be sustained: Bytedance is reportedly cutting back on the marketing spend that supported its rise. Last week, three US senators called for an investigation over concerns of data collection and potential political censorship by the Chinese app. The company would not comment beyond a recent statement saying that it stores all US data in the US and Singapore.

A home for Gen Z

TikTok provides a native environment for videos that are under 60 seconds long; many popular pieces run shorter. New videos automatically play after one ends, eliminating the need to scroll and search. In format, it is similar to Twitter-owned Vine, which once boasted 100 million monthly active users (and was shuttered during a round of cost cuts in October 2016). Like Vine, it plays into Gen Z’s shrinking attention spans, which average at 8 seconds, compared to 12 seconds for millennials, according to Magnetic North’s US-centric report.

While TikTok’s competitors have also invested in video, the app comes without the baggage of heavy advertising and an established class of influencers. It is seen by younger consumers — 56 per cent of whom use social media specifically for self-expression and conveying their individuality, according to Magnetic North — as a home for more candid, unfiltered content. “Younger communities are starting to look for platforms where they… [do] not have to put on their ‘Insta-face’,” says Kory Marchisotto, chief marketing officer at Elf Cosmetics, which has been active on TikTok since June.

In turn, this encourages consumers to submit more user-generated content than they might on other platforms. “By letting users create their own videos for a challenge or campaign, brands give users a sense that they’re part of [a wider community],” explains Laura Perez, director of communications at TikTok.

Using events to drum up traction

Many brands have found success by creating campaigns tied to buzzy events and holidays, and then offering prizes to incentivise customers to create content in response.

MAC Cosmetics launched its first TikTok campaign, a hashtag challenge called #YouOwnIt, pegged to September’s New York Fashion Week. Users responded to the hashtag, which was a prompt to showcase their individuality, with videos that incorporated everything from makeover transformations to funky runway walks. (Some were from creators like @GlitterandLazers and @SethOBrien that the brand had enlisted to respond.)

The result was 1.5 billion views in six days, the highest amount to date for a TikTok campaign over a similar period. (The #YouOwnIt challenge now has over 2.3 billion views.) More importantly for MAC, over 700 pieces of content have been created using the hashtag, says Kelly Solomon, senior vice president of consumer marketing at MAC. “TikTok is a content creation platform more than a social network, so it’s not all about traditional engagement. We were looking for consumers to get up off the couch and create with us.”

Ralph Lauren debuted on the app during the US Open in August, becoming the first brand to launch a hashtag challenge campaign on the platform tied to a sporting event. It produced a series of short clips featuring Gen Z actress Diana Silvers displaying her tennis skills in a match where she celebrated her “wins” with the help of the platform’s native design type effects. Users were encouraged to create similar videos tagged #WinningRL, all of whom would be then entered to win Ralph Lauren swag. The campaign’s hashtag — which includes Ralph Lauren’s videos and all of those created in response — has since garnered over 700 million views.

Introduce a competitive element

By contrast, a more polished video from the same Ralph Lauren campaign posted on YouTube has only 8,000 views, highlighting a potential downside to YouTube’s professionally shot and less mobile-friendly approach. The older platform also affords less direct participation from consumers, limiting the scope of engagement. (Ralph Lauren declined to comment on how their objectives differed by platform.)

The ability to run contests on TikTok seems to raise the number of active participants significantly. A recent campaign from Elf Cosmetics dubbed #EyesLipsFace offered some respondents $250 worth of product each. In turn, over a million videos were created, the most user-generated videos ever created for a TikTok campaign. The challenge went so viral that actress Reese Witherspoon, who doesn’t have commercial links with Elf, also participated.

Eos ran a hashtag challenge called #MakeItAwesome in September, offering 30 lip balms to whoever created the most exciting content. That resulted in over 3.8 billion views, making it one of the most successful sponsored challenges on the platform thus far. “Brands that embrace the platform for its strength — an incredibly engaged community, and rapid virality of content — also need to embrace the reality that as a marketer… you’re really letting users tell the story,” says Eos chief marketing officer Soyoung Kang.

Be comfortable with vague results

Despite the high amount of views and participation that many fashion and beauty brands are witnessing on TikTok, it’s still difficult for them to measure whether these campaigns affect sales. “But we’re perfectly fine with that because that wasn’t what it was designed for,” says MAC’s Solomon.

Given how young the platform is, this isn’t surprising. (Instagram, which launched in 2010, didn’t debut business profiles with analytics and the ability to promote posts until 2016.) With brands increasingly relying on social platforms to reach viewers, however, the stakes are higher than they were when Instagram launched.

Brands are getting creative about how to measure TikTok’s impact. After the success of Eos’s challenge, the company commissioned an independent brand awareness study to see how the TikTok audience compared to a control group that didn’t use the platform. To their excitement, users on TikTok had three times better brand recall than the other group.

Some analysts believe that the nascent nature of TikTok is central to its appeal for brands. “Marketers like that the rules of TikTok are still being written,” says Rachel Saunders, director of consumer insights at Magnetic North. “While the platform definitely has its own culture that brands should adhere to, the same level of social rules and algorithm navigation [that they’ve grown used to] isn’t required in order… to be successful.”

Others believe that it’s only a matter of time before they see direct sales from the platform. “I’m sure one day they will crack a revenue opportunity, and I’d rather have experience using the platform when that opportunity comes,” says Solomon.

Rachel Saunders