Find out why American Girl and Duracell are having moments on TikTok.
Ad Age expanded its “Creativity Top 5” series to include roundups of our favorite special-interest campaigns and ideas from brands. This week, we're looking at the latest installment looks at the best TikTok videos posted by brands over the past month.
In this lineup: restaurant-sponsored weddings, waterproof makeup and reality TV drama.
Canada geese have a reputation for being a bit hostile and aggressive—but a TikTok video documenting their travels across Washington, D.C. helped soften people’s perspectives on the species. When two of these geese nested in one of the terraces on the National Geographic Society’s building, one of the publication’s journalists, Doug Main, documented the relocation of the goose couple and their three goslings to a pond in Constitution Gardens, a much more appropriate home for the fowl family. Main narrates the nearly three-minute long journey, which shows volunteers escorting the geese through the streets of D.C. and across busy roads before happily swimming away in the pond. TikTok quickly became enamored with the family of geese, and the video pulled in 1.5 million views.
American Girl's 1998 book “The Care and Keeping of You: The Body Book for Girls” has achieved a memetic status online, with many Gen Z women and girls collectively recalling the mortifying experience of being handed the book as they entered puberty. The brand acknowledged the enduring influence of the guidebook in a video featuring two American Girl dolls unearthing a time capsule containing the book and a note reading, “The only thing the future will ever need.” The two dolls open the book to a page demonstrating the proper way to wear a bra before each blinking bewilderedly at the camera. Thousands of women and girls familiar with the embarrassing yet universal experience of reading the book flocked to the video, propelling it to 1.8 million views on TikTok.
When a TikTok video from Georgia bride Madison Mulkey breaking down the cost of her wedding went viral, restaurant brand Chili’s immediately jumped on its inclusion of one of the brand’s party platters in her wedding budget. Chili’s partnered with agency Mischief to launch a contest that challenged couples to film their proposals inside of a Chili’s restaurant, upload the video to TikTok and tag the brand’s account. The first three couples to do so would receive free catering from Chili’s at their weddings—and in less than 24 hours, those three winners had already been chosen. The video kicking off the Chili’s contest garnered 2 million views.
In 2017, rapper Maria-Cecilia Simone Kelly, also known as Rico Nasty, released her song, “Beat My Face,” which references L’Oréal-owned cosmetics brand Urban Decay with the line, “It’s gon’ stay ‘cause it’s Urban Decay.” The brand recently picked up on the rapper’s implicit endorsement of the long-lasting potential of its makeup, leveraging the song to promote its various waterproof products and collaborating with Kelly herself on several videos. One fairly simple video set to Kelly’s song features someone applying multiple shades of waterproof eyeliner to their leg before dipping that leg into a swimming pool and demonstrating the product hasn’t smudged. That video has amassed over 21 million views.
Though Ariana Madix, one of the stars of Bravo’s reality series “Vanderpump Rules,” may have lost her boyfriend and fellow cast member Tom Sandoval to a cheating scandal—a pop culture moment the internet has referred to as “Scandoval”—Madix has certainly made quite a few dollars from brands capitalizing on the scandal in their marketing. One notable example is Duracell, which teamed up with Madix on a TikTok video laden with references to the TV series and common themes in the couple’s on-screen arguments. At the start of the TikTok video, for example, Madix throws a bottle of white nail polish off-screen, nodding to Sandoval’s frequent use of the color on his own nails. And Duracell’s batteries, too, reflect a point of tension between the former couple, as Sandoval complained during the show that Madix never bought new batteries for him. The tongue-in-cheek TikTok video is currently sitting at 24 million views.
