Why brands are rethinking TikTok’s casual style for more polished social strategy

The prevailing social media playbook of the past few years has advised brands to emulate TikTok creators by leaning into raw, unfiltered video content and jumping on the latest memes and fleeting video trends. Lately, however, the pendulum has begun to swing in the other direction as a growing number of brands push out more polished social content to stand out from the online crowd. Just a few weeks ago, beauty brand Tower 28 launched a three-episode sketch series, “The Blush Lives of Sensitive Girls” (a play on the Max series “The Sex Lives of College Girls”), to promote its new powder blushes. Tower 28 Founder and CEO Amy Liu told Ad Age she had been discussing the possibility of producing a social media series for a while, so when comedian and influencer Olivia Sui mentioned to Liu that she wanted to try her hand at directing, Liu took it as an opportunity to experiment with a highly produced social series. @tower28beauty GetSet for blush that doesn’t ghost. Shop it early on 3/12, exclusively on the @sephora ♬ original sound - Tower 28 Beauty Tower 28 still mailed PR packages to influencers and reposted influencer content on its social channels to amplify the launch, but “The Blush Lives of College Girls” generated far more buzz than any other content from the campaign, according to the company. The engagement rate across the three skits was 37% higher than Tower 28’s monthly average, and the three videos were the most-viewed pieces of content on Tower 28’s Instagram in the past four weeks, accounting for 58% of its overall views on the platform in that four-week period, a brand spokesperson said. Tower 28 is just one of several brands increasingly leaning into serialized and higher-quality social content. Last week, Milani Cosmetics released a three-minute episode of “America’s Next Top Primer” on YouTube, posting shorter cuts of its “America’s Next Top Model” spoof on Instagram and TikTok. The in-house campaign is part of Milani’s overarching goal of building the brand’s voice on social media while still embracing the popularity of influencers, said Jeremy Lowenstein, Milani’s chief marketing officer. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Milani Cosmetics (@milanicosmetics) Rather than recruiting beauty influencers to rave about the brand’s new primer in a flurry of sponsored social posts, Milani instead tapped several comedy creators—including Natalie Shine, Zoe Kim, Imani Blackmon and Joe Hegyes—to star in its scripted social campaign and “bring their own comedic form and style to the table,” Lowenstein said. “There’s sort of been a reckoning in the marketing world around brand-led content and creator and influencer content,” he said. “Brands need to maintain their voice, but make sure [their social content] still resonates. So, it’s a little bit of bringing the creators into our world … and tapping into the strengths of creators who have both an audience and a talent for being comedians and working together in an ensemble.” Sign up for our Influencer Marketing newsletter While neither Tower 28 nor Milani worked with creative agencies to produce their social media series, some agencies told Ad Age they’re seeing an uptick in interest in more polished, serialized social content. “Even if [they’re] not directly asking for it, the references and the things that are inspiring them are in that space,” said Jamie Falkowski, chief creative officer at Day One Agency. For one of its clients, Converse, the agency has produced multiple social media series over the past year, Falkowski said, including a four-episode mockumentary series on Instagram called “Into the Archives.” That series explored the pop culture history of Converse’s star chevron logo with fictional host Alistar Chevalier, played by rapper and actor Jasper Dolphin. The four “Into the Archives” episodes, along with additional videos featuring the Alistar Chevalier character, garnered over 6.4 million views and nearly 27 million impressions, according to the agency. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Call me AP (@anthonyprinceleslie) “We’re seeing this want [from clients] to almost go back to what commercials used to be,” Falkowski said. “And it makes sense. For the generations that they’re trying to reach—younger millennials, Gen Z and even Gen Alpha—[social media] is their TV, in a lot of ways.” Indeed, many young consumers today consider social media platforms to be a source of entertainment rather than a place to share life updates or connect with friends or family. A recent survey from The Harris Poll found that 76% of adult Gen Zers say they use social media for entertainment and nearly half (47%) spend between two and four hours each day on social platforms. Over one in five (22%) use social media for seven hours or more per day, according to the survey. The ‘brain-rot-ification’ of social media Brands creating high-quality video series for their social channels isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. Brooklyn-based jewelry and lifestyle brand Alexis Bittar has been following the lives of two fictional New Yorkers—wealthy socialite and “emotional terrorist” Margeaux Goldrich and her long-suffering personal assistant Jules Lynch—in a series of social videos since late 2023. The telenovela-inspired series, dubbed the “Bittarverse,” quickly went viral upon its online debut and has since translated into both sales and foot traffic for the brand, Jessica Steele, VP of sales and marketing at Alexis Bittar, said at Ad Age’s NextGen Marketing Summit. @alexisbittar Upper East Side terror, Margeaux with Jules, her abused personal assistant - doing some mich needed holiday shopping. #alexisbittarjewelry #alexisbittar #uppereastside ♬ original sound - Alexis Bittar In just the past year, the brand’s “Bittarverse” content received 13 million impressions from consumers who haven’t previously visited Alexis Bittar’s website or purchased products from the brand before, Brook Shepard, founder and CEO of ad agency Mason Interactive, which worked with Alexis Bittar to create the video series, said at the Summit. The recent spike in the number of brands launching social media series, however, is likely part of a larger movement among both marketers and creators to “counter the brain-rot-ification of social,” said Zach Blume, co-founder and president of social and creator content company Portal A, which in the past year has created multiple social media series for Target. Posting “huge volumes of social content” following the latest memes or bizarre internet humor can work for some brands, but “it can definitely be a race to the bottom in terms of quality, branding and storytelling,” Blume said. “Brands increasingly are recognizing that social media and working with creators can be a brand-building exercise and not just farming views or just trying to reach eyeballs at any cost,” he added. “As these spaces mature, there’s a broader pivot happening across brand social content and influencer marketing toward higher-quality brand storytelling—just like fans would want to see in other spaces.” @target ✨tiny✨ASMR, BIG crunch. @Tabitha Brown’s viral popcorn is BACK. Link in bio to shop Tabitha Brown’s Target receipt!🧾🎯 #TinyTarget @Nic Few ♬ original sound - target Portal A’s Blume estimates that social media series such as these typically require six-figure production budgets, whereas TV commercials often have seven-figure price tags after paying all the agencies and production companies involved in creating them. “You can make high-quality brand content on social and with creators for a fraction of what it costs, both in terms of creative and in terms of media, for a comparable project on TV,” he said. Brands can also often capture additional behind-the-scenes content while on the sets of their social media series, Falkowski said. In the span of a two-day shoot for Converse, Day One Agency filmed five episodes of a new video series and shot a plethora of additional highly-produced videos for future social content, he said. “We were able to focus on world-building versus just a single narrative,” he added. But even as more brands prioritize polished and serialized social content, “the day-to-day [social strategy] is still going to be to fit in with the culture of Instagram or TikTok,” Blume said. “That’s still going to kind of be the baseline.” In other words, the brand “brain rot” isn’t going away any time soon.

Why brands are rethinking TikTok’s casual style for more polished social strategy

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