Tiktok Awards

Two former TikTok Award winners share the secrets of their success

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Successful TikTok campaigns drive results with the perfect balance of art and science. Creativity is vital for engaging, entertaining content, but the best-performing ads are skilfully tailored to take advantage of the platform's unique quirks. With categories to reward Greatest Creative, Greatest Performance and, new for 2023, Greatest Small Business – as well as Greatest TikTok overall – the TikTok Awards drill deep into exactly what it takes to produce best-in-class ads on the platform. And there are plenty of lessons to be learned from the campaigns that impressed the judges in 2022, the inaugural year for the scheme, which saw incredible entries from across Europe. The chair of last year's judging panel, Creative Review editor Eliza Williams, observes that the most successful campaigns stood out for their informal, funny, and friendly approach. "The campaigns stayed true to the brands' core values, but the style was often much looser than you might be used to," she explains. With entries now open for the TikTok Awards 2023, we look back at two of last year's winners to unpick the secrets of their success.

Empower your community

How to create award-winning TikTok campaigns

"Authenticity is what makes a brand go from good to great on TikTok."

— Sophie Drury, KitKat

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Created a world-class TikTok campaign? Submit it to the TikTok Awards

Channel 4 won overall Greatest TikTok in 2022 with a campaign that celebrates its founding mission: to represent unheard voices and cultural diversity. Inspired by the channel's new 'Altogether Different' tagline, the TikTok-native campaign engaged the widest possible audience by capitalising on a huge trend on the platform: 'Tell me, without telling me'. "We're often made to think that difference divides us. We disagree," explains Christos Savvides, digital creative director at Channel 4. "We believe being different is brilliant, and that our shared uniqueness brings us together." As part of a wider nationwide TV and off-air campaign, 'Altogether Different' features a diverse range of on-screen talent from Channel 4 shows. On TikTok, large-scale audience participation through a Branded Hashtag Challenge (now succeeded by similar ad format, Branded Mission) brought the message home. "TikTok is a place where people feel comfortable participating and being themselves," says Savvides. "We wanted to give our audience a platform to embrace what makes them different. This positive spin encouraged people to showcase things about themselves when they may have previously been less inclined to do so." Creators were simply asked to showcase what makes them different, with a proud and celebratory flourish. Beyond this, the brief was refreshingly open: "Whatever they wanted to showcase as their point of difference, they did," continues Savvides. "This freedom meant we had a diverse range of submissions from the very start, landing the message that this challenge was all about positivity and inclusion."

Authenticity is key, not just in terms of the message and delivery, but how faithfully the campaign represents your brand values. Music was a critical thread weaved throughout 'Altogether Different' to tie all the diverse content together in a distinctively ‘Channel 4’ way. "Using the right track sets the tone and can elicit the emotional response required for the storytelling," explains Savvides. To land the message that the campaign celebrates our differences, Channel 4 commissioned a custom soundtrack based on simple repetition of a one-word lyric: 'Me'. "It was surprisingly catchy, playful, and fitting of the celebratory visuals," he adds. "And it worked perfectly alongside the audience's submissions." Accessibility features such as speech-to-text made the challenge more inclusive, helping to drive participation from often underrepresented voices. The response was phenomenal: 287,000 users created a total of 827,000 videos, with a staggering 9.2 billion views in total. "It significantly exceeded our all benchmarks," reveals Savvides.

Set the right tone

Brand awareness-boosting engagement figures in the billions are gold-dust for an entertainment brand like Channel 4. When it comes to driving measurable results at the lower end of the marketing funnel, the benchmarks for success are different – but creativity is still vital to get there. Rather than taking a hard-sell approach, cult barbershop chain and men's grooming brand Johnny's Chop Shop set out to dispense practical advice on how to use haircare products. "We knew from research that people really wanted more information, but apart from going to their barber they didn't know where to turn," explains Jonathan Dee, marketing director at Johnny's Chop Shop's parent company SLG Brands. In a campaign that won Greatest Performance at the TikTok Awards 2022, SLG Brands teamed up with popular TikTok creator Elliot Forbes – who has almost 10 million followers – to produce a content series sharing professional hairstyling secrets, including how to get the most from the various Johnny's Chop Shop products at home.

Be useful and interesting

According to TikTok's director of business marketing Trevor Johnson, Johnny's Chop Shop was particularly notable for its effective test-and-learn approach: vital to success on TikTok, and one of the key judging criteria for the Greatest Performance award. "Throughout the year, the brand created and posted multiple native TikTok videos – from product explanations, to responses to questions, to 'how to use' demos – and then boosted its best performing content using Spark Ads," he explains. "We set KPIs behind all of our content, but the performance of Elliot's videos that replied to questions from the comments exceeded all our expectations," reveals Dee at SLG Brands. "Our product demonstration videos also went viral with millions of views, and over half of people watching them all the way through." "We let the algorithm work its magic, then analysed engagement, average watch times, and watch-through rates," he adds. Only when content performed organically was budget spent on boosting it, a pragmatic approach that contributed to 25% year-on-year sales growth.

Keep testing and learning

Data is hugely persuasive when making a case to an awards jury – particularly for a performance award – but entrants don't need to overcomplicate things. "Figures are vital to demonstrate when something has really worked, but they can also be annoying, confusing and occasionally misleading," points out Creative Review's Williams. "It's not just about the size of the numbers, but the way the campaign impacted the brand. Smaller brands may have smaller numbers, but these can be hugely significant for their business." The solution: make the context crystal-clear to make life easier for judges. "We kept our entry very simple," confirms Dee at SLG Brands. "Clear evidence of the videos' performance on TikTok; clear evidence of the impact they had on the brand awareness of Johnny's Chop Shop; and full-funnel evidence, backed up by our top-three performing TikToks, showing clear impact on sales within the retailer." Results like these rarely happen overnight: Dee advocates constant experimentation to find the right approach for your brand. "Employ a team who understand the platform; own, analyse and act on the data; listen and understand your consumer; and have fun with it," he concludes. "It's the same stuff that makes for all powerful marketing. But TikTok lets you take off the handbrake and get closer than ever to the soul of your brand."

Put success in context

Channel 4's 'Altogether Different' won Greatest TikTok in 2022

Johnny's Chop Shop won for Greatest Performance