Dove listened to skin care aficionados on TikTok before launching its new body wash.
TikTok struck a defiant tone at an intimate advertising gathering on Thursday, telling marketers the app will combat the U.S. in its plan to force a sale of the company. Meanwhile, to shore up advertiser trust, TikTok brought Unilever to the stage demonstrating how the major marketer supports the platform.
TikTok also gave demos of some key new ad products, including a generative AI assistant that puts brands next to hot trends on the app.
On Thursday, TikTok held the final NewFront of the week, following rivals Google, Meta and Snap. The invite-only event with limited press access comes at a turbulent time for TikTok. U.S. lawmakers want the company to sever ties with Chinese-based ByteDance or it could be banned in the country within a year.
Last month, the U.S. passed a law that forces Chinese-owner ByteDance to divest from its U.S. TikTok holdings. Lawmakers were worried about how such a powerful media platform could influence U.S. consumers, and whether its ties to China could allow a potential foreign adversary to wield that power. That type of uncertainty could put a damper on NewFronts negotiations, which is the time of year that platforms press advertisers to commit to growing their long-term investments.
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It’s no surprise, then, that Blake Chandlee, TikTok’s president of global business solutions, opened the NewFront by addressing the threat. “I want you to know that we are not backing down,” Chandlee said, before continuing with the presentation.
The focus was on how brands can tap into the cultural relevance of TikTok, which has become a powerful engine for conversation on topics ranging from lifestyle to sports to literature to entertainment to beauty to fashion and more. The effectiveness of TikTok is also partly what prodded U.S. lawmakers to act against it.
TikTok also offered up a video testimonial featuring some agency supporters from media holding companies, who spoke about the platform’s attributes all while attempting to channel one of the app’s recent trending formats.
For brands, TikTok is mostly a way to interact with consumers. Brands have been using TikTok, and its creators, to get their new products seen and promoted in whimsical videos. Often the videos are less like ads and more like everyday testimonials and demos that speak directly to viewers. That’s how Unilever was able to jump into TikTok after it saw a Vaseline trend on the platform last year. Vaseline’s experience became a famous case study in how TikTok can revitalize a 150-year-old brand.
Vaseline’s image was reinvented on TikTok, where brands are “discovered and rediscovered,” said Kathleen Dunlop, Unilever’s chief marketing officer, beauty and wellbeing, North America, said at TikTok’s NewFront event on Thursday. The brand saw TikTokers talking about “slugging,” which is when people apply petroleum jelly to their faces at the end of their nightly skincare rituals. Slugging isn’t new, but it gained attention because of TikTok. Vaseline made sure that it was part of those conversations through ads and organic activity on the app.
After an ad campaign, Vaseline reached an 81% share of voice in videos about “slugging,” meaning the vast majority of videos on the subject mentioned the brand. Also, annual Vaseline sales recently topped $1 billion in Europe for the first time, Dunlop said.
The success of that campaign led Unilever to launch a new product, Dove Serum Body Wash, through TikTok promotions this year. Unilever has a roster of about 300 TikTok creators it can access, and it did work with some of them for the new body wash. The campaign started with an ad with the tagline Get Dove Or Get FOAMO.
The idea for the body wash partly came from listening to social media conversation and identifying that skincare fanatics are covered when it comes to their faces, but not many products have a full-body solution, Dunlop said. The campaign, which launched in February, and linked directly to retailers’ sites, has already led to a million visits to websites where the new body wash is sold, Dunlop added.
The products are sold in stores including Target, Kroger and Dollar General.
TikTok was selling the agencies, publishers and brands in attendance on how they could also partake in trends. One of its major product launches was for an AI assistant that helps find the right trends for brands.
TikTok said the experimental AI assistant would be available this year in a product called TikTok Pulse Custom Lineups. The idea is a brand tells the generative AI chatbot what topics it wants to highlight for a campaign, e.g. luxury travel or community connection. The advertiser types in the topic, say, “New York culture.” The machine then surfaces a lineup of popular videos related to the topic so an advertiser can appear next to those videos, inserting itself into trending moments.
The custom lineup of ads is an extension of TikTok Pulse, which launched two years ago, offering brands some security that they would run next to the top tier of creators on the app. TikTok also has Pulse Premiere, where the ads run next to videos from publishing and media partners including NHL, Condé Nast and NBCUniversal, among others.
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“Now we’re able to have a real conversation, a meaningful conversation, but in order to stand out through all of that content that’s coming at us all the time, I think we as marketers, as media planners, we have a challenge,” Dunlop said. “We need to go from just caring about being visible and being first in the feed to what value we provide. We need to be meaningful so that we earn the right to be first in the moment.”
