Duolingo, Dunkin’ and Max each garnered millions of views on TikTok videos in the past month–despite the platform’s brief mid-January shutdown.
This installment of Ad Age’s “Creativity Top 5” series looks at the best TikTok videos posted by brands over the past few weeks, which were certainly a chaotic time on the platform.
In this month’s lineup: Sony Pictures joins TikTok users in lamenting the platform’s shutdown, Duolingo reveals the team behind its unhinged TikTok content and Max nods to Zendaya’s engagement.
Carpenter’s hit song “Espresso” played a major role in her rise to pop stardom over the past year, and Dunkin’ capitalized on her link to the beverage to collaborate with Carpenter on a limited-edition drink unveiled in late December—“Sabrina’s Brown Sugar Shakin’ Espresso.” Dunkin’s campaign promoting the drink leaned into Carpenter’s frequent use of innuendos in her music, with an ad centered on Carpenter (and several others) “shaking their ess.” On TikTok, that ad has garnered over 10.2 million views and nearly 800,000 likes, while several other TikTok videos starring Carpenter have collectively garnered an additional 10.3 million views.
Ben & Jerry’s is famous for its political activism and purpose-driven marketing—so, when some TikTok commenters began calling for Ben & Jerry’s to stop posting about politics and “stick to ice cream” in the wake of President Trump’s inauguration, the brand swiftly pushed back. Its response came in the form of a 90-second TikTok video in which Palika Makam, Ben & Jerry’s U.S. activism lead, and Christopher Miller, its global social mission director, double down on the brand’s commitment to a slew of social and political causes. The video also highlights several comments from consumers who appreciate that Ben & Jerry’s doesn’t just “stick to ice cream,” and Miller notes that the brand’s fans “wouldn’t want it any other way.” As of this writing, the video has garnered more than 13.8 million views on TikTok in just five days.
Tensions were high in the days leading up to what many TikTok users thought would be a permanent shutdown of the platform in the U.S., with creators scrambling to coax their TikTok audiences to follow them on other social platforms and thousands of users joining the Chinese platform Xiaohongshu, or RedNote, as an act of protest against the TikTok ban. Many TikTok users and creators opted to take their frustrations out on Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who played a role in the U.S. government’s decision to ban TikTok.
Sony Pictures jumped on the Zuckerberg hate train, too, uploading a clip from the movie “The Social Network” in which Andrew Garfield’s character (and real-life co-founder of Facebook) Eduardo Saverin grabs a laptop from Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg) and smashes it on the ground. The entertainment company also nodded to TikTok users’ disapproval of Zuckerberg with on-screen text reading “all of us this week.” The video has racked up over 28.8 million views and nearly 5 million likes, along with an impressive 314,000 shares.
Other brands braced for the looming TikTok shutdown by sharing bittersweet farewell messages. Duolingo, one of the most popular brands on the platform, shared several videos in the hours leading up to the scheduled shutdown—but the one that attracted the most attention was the video unveiling the different members of the team behind Duolingo’s beloved TikTok content, including its social media managers (Zaria Parvez and Kelsey Dempsey); the “guy in the [Duo] suit,” Duolingo’s senior marketing manager, Mark Pavic; co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, Luis von Ahn; and Duolingo’s general counsel, Stephen Chen, who approved all of the language learning brand’s unhinged TikTok videos before they were posted. At the end of the video, which is set to the Green Day song “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life),” the group tosses the Duo mascot costume into a dumpster.
The video quickly amassed more than 30 million views and 2 million likes, along with over 33,000 comments from both brand fans and other social media managers lamenting the approaching TikTok shutdown. Of course, the platform only ended up being offline for a little over 12 hours, so Duolingo’s heartfelt goodbye ultimately wasn’t necessary—and the brand poked fun at that fact by reversing a video of Pavic taking the Duo suit off and writing “I took my wig off for you and everything” in on-screen text.
It wasn’t all doom and gloom on social media this month, though. Zendaya, who starred in the hit HBO series “Euphoria,” subtly revealed her engagement to her longtime boyfriend and fellow actor Tom Holland by wearing her engagement ring to the Golden Globes earlier this month. When thousands of netizens started sharing zoomed-in photos of Zendaya’s ring and speculating whether she was truly engaged or if it was merely a red herring, Max joined in on the conversation with a split-screen TikTok video juxtaposing a red carpet photo of Zendaya at the Golden Globes and a scene from “Euphoria.” In the clip, one character asks Zendaya’s character, Rue, “When was this?”—and she replies “Right after New Year’s.” While the two characters are talking about something else in the context of the show, Max took the exchange out of context to instead have “this” refer to Zendaya getting engaged (which, given the Jan. 5 timing of the Golden Globes, was in fact “right after New Year’s”). Max’s video generated over 54.4 million views and 5.3 million likes, as well as nearly 454,000 shares.
