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 best TikTok videos posted by brands over the past month. See last month's installment here.
This month: Lizzo, Scrub Daddy, and Sprite.
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Canadian coffee chain Tim Hortons is bringing back the Biebs. The brand is partnering with pop star Justin Bieber for a new French vanilla-flavored “Biebs Brew”, which will be available in stores in Canada and the U.S. starting June 6. Last year, Tim Hortons partnered with Bieber (who is from Ontario, Canada) for “Timbiebs,” a play on the brands “Timbits” donut holes. The brand teased the new cold brew release with TikTok videos starring Bieber, which gained around 256,000 views.
Remember when we all assumed TikTok was just that dance app for kids? The viral dances have stayed, and the latest is Lizzo's hit, “About Damn Time,” with choreography created by Jaeden Gomez. While Lizzo isn't a brand per se, her song and moves are so catchy that several celebrities, including Johnathan Van Ness, Selena Gomez, and Blake Shelton, are doing it, along with TikTokers who don’t normally dance on their page, such as Bretman Rock, Anna Sitar, and Rahul Rai. Lizzo herself has posted several videos of the dance, including one in the bathroom at the Met Gala. The sound has over 1 million views on TikTok, and it remains to be seen whether brands will hop on the trend.
Scrub Daddy’s TikTok team has been stepping up its game lately. The sponge brand recently did a TikTok collaboration with Duolingo where the two mascots gave birth to baby owl sponges. Both accounts posted an original video that started with the song “I’m Glad You Came” by The Wanted. Duolingo has since taken the video down from its account and replaced it with a more PG version, joking, “We’re back after legal review.” But Scrub Daddy has kept the TikTok, and made another that highlighted fan art of the couple, hitting 5.7 million views.
Sprite has found itself the star of a new challenge on TikTok. The #SpriteChallenge is pretty straightforward—drink a personal-sized bottle of Sprite without burping. The hashtag has over 537 million views, yet Sprite has yet to publicly acknowledge the challenge. Creators have even tried the trend using Dr. Pepper, Fanta and San Pelligrino.
“Whether they acknowledge it or not, the trend is happening and it’s reshaping how millions of people perceive the brand and decide what drink to buy,” Tom Hyde, VP of strategy at Movers+Shakers, said in an email. “Burps are hilarious. A hearty surprise burp is a unique product benefit that no soda brand has dared assign budget against, but with the magic of creator culture and the open TikTok algorithm, Sprite didn’t have to.”
While Amazon has a couple of TikTok accounts, it recently made one focused on Amazon Prime. For its debut video, Amazon enlisted the help of Jason Derulo (who has his own 52 million followers), captioning the video, “Oh hey TikTok. We’re new here. @Jason Derulo what did we miss?” Derulo runs through popular trends from the last year on TikTok.
But users were quick to call out Amazon, with comments like: “You missed paying your employees more and giving them better working conditions,” and “You missed paying your workers a livable wage." Still, the inaugural TikTok has over 29 million views.
In a true example of leaning into TikTok, Prime’s next video showed a person dressed up in Prime boxes checking the first video, and “Realizing we’re just a corporate account in the comments.”
