The promotion of a “Venom”-themed text-to-speech option, Gap’s nostalgic holiday campaign and McDonald’s Kai Cenat collab drew attention on TikTok over the past several weeks.
This installment of Ad Age’s expanded “Creativity Top 5” series looks at the best TikTok videos posted by brands over the past few weeks.
In this month’s lineup: Sesame Street soothes anxious TikTokers on Election Day, Kai Cenat unveils McDonald’s Chicken Big Mac and Adidas takes a stab at Gen Z’s surreal humor.
Rather than kick off its “Give Your Gift” holiday campaign with a cheesy Christmas carol, Gap enlisted several young music artists to perform an acapella version of Janet Jackson’s “Together Again.” Although the set for the 60-second video is minimalist, featuring only a beige backdrop and a cream-colored sofa for the music artists to gather around, their brightly colored sweaters, scarves and beautiful vocal harmonies quickly captured TikTok’s attention
As of writing, the ad has 9.7 million views and over 500 comments, many from young millennials sharing their nostalgia for the Gap holiday campaigns of their youth, which the video triggered.
“We want to be where our customers are, delivering engaging style-led content,” said Fabiola Torres, chief marketing officer of Gap, in a release. “This year’s campaign champions creators’ authentic voices and styles, celebrating their creativity and originality.”
In the days leading up to last week’s presidential election, several brands sought to soothe anxious American consumers with comforting and uplifting social content, including meditation app Calm and beauty brand Saie. “Sesame Street” stitched together a handful of tranquil scenes from the “Sesame Street” set, including one of Elmo silently sitting on his front stoop and added in the sound of chirping birds. The video, initially posted on Election Day, has since garnered 14.4 million views, 2.7 million likes and nearly 20,000 comments from users confiding in Elmo about their new post-election anxieties. It’s reminiscent of Elmo’s internet wellness check in February of this year, when thousands of brands and social media users unloaded their stress and grief onto the 3-year-old puppet.
About a week before launching its Chicken Big Mac, McDonald’s enlisted Kai Cenat to drum up excitement around the limited-edition menu item. After initially teasing the partnership with a six-second TikTok video of a McDonald’s takeout bag sitting on Cenat’s desk (which alone racked up over four million views), the fast food restaurant posted a second video of Cenat opening the bag and showing off the chicken sandwich to the camera before taking a bite. In the video, he urges viewers to “pull up” on Oct. 10—both to a McDonald’s restaurant to try the newly launched Chicken Big Mac, and to Cenat’s McDonald’s-sponsored livestream on the same day featuring special guest Grimace.
The TikTok video of Cenat revealing the upcoming Chicken Big Mac launch by opening the takeout bag has garnered more than 16.1 million views, just under 664,000 likes and more than 8,500 comments. McDonald’s also received an additional 13.4 million views on its video promoting Cenat’s livestream on launch day.
See also: How McDonald’s marketed the Chicken Big Mac’s U.S. debut
The TikTok videos that resonate most with Gen Z are often the ones that make the least amount of sense, as proven by the virality of Nutter Butter’s extremely bizarre TikTok content. But brands don’t need to completely veer into a hodgepodge of surreal imagery to engage with Gen Z’s love of nonsensical humor, as Adidas proved with a TikTok starring Spanish pro soccer player Lamine Yamal. The eight-second video simply shows Yamal (who is a Gen Zer) fixing his hair in a small gold mirror. But the video’s unnerving setting—a room with black walls and floors—and the fact that the person holding the mirror up for Yamal remains unseen even as the camera zooms out, lend it a surreal, dreamlike quality. The on-screen text jokingly suggesting the time one minute before 8:00 is 7:99, rather than 7:59, is the cherry on top.
The Gen Zers of TikTok certainly appreciated Adidas’ embrace of absurdism—the video has since received 17.6 million views and 2.2 million likes, and has been bookmarked by nearly 140,000 users.
Like Adidas’ above video, the TikTok marketing campaign for the Sony Pictures movie “Venom: The Last Dance” was undoubtedly developed with Gen Z in mind. The “Venom” TikTok account has racked up millions of views on each of its videos in the weeks surrounding the film’s Oct. 25 release date, from a TikTok tapping into the trend of using a video of someone falling or getting hit by something as a hook that received 21 million views to one of actress Peggy Lu, who portrays the character Mrs. Chen, doing the viral dance to Charli XCX’s song “Apple,” that amassed over 55 million.
The “Venom” account’s most viral TikTok, however, features the titular character promoting a new text-to-speech option on the platform mimicking his voice. After an ominous start to the video, where Venom says, “Hello TikTok. We are in your device,” he demonstrates how TikTok users can type any sentence and have it read in Venom’s voice—even a lyric from pop princess Sabrina Carpenter. That video, posted on Nov. 1, has since received a massive 138 million views and 5.4 million likes.
