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Feb ‘22 Blog
Trend Roundup
Highkey cringe, lowkey true.
This week’s roundup sees a common theme of mildly ~suggestive~ but fully awkward confessions and complaints.
Just when you think it’s getting hot in here…TikTok creators make it the exact opposite. This trend is all about highlighting things that are too long. Like waiting for a text back. Or your cat’s lanky bod.
Used to get blamed for something questionable that ended up just being extremely on-brand for you? Leave it to Francesca Farago to jump on this one.
There is literally nothing quite as raunchy as out-of-context Spongebob sounds. Check this one out for TikTokker’s latest gripes about the last resort.
Stir The Pot
All aboard the animal-ish train.
The success of Duolingo’s mascot (whose videos on average rack up 3–5 million views, some going up all the way to 22 million) has inspired other household names like Sour Patch Kids and The Empire State Building to jump on the non-human trend – as it’s proven to be easily replicable and iterative.
“With a mascot, ‘you don't have to have someone going out and getting tons of video,’ [and] it doesn’t take as much time to create and edit a video of a character as shooting an entirely new concept would.”
While the non-human-but-alive-thing influencer strategy has proven to be successful on TikTok, it’s not always translatable across social media and other mediums. IG Reels, for example, which perform better with aspirational content, have shown little success for Duo.
If the ads streamed on Super Bowl LVI confirmed anything, it’s that American advertisers are also officially swapping sentiment for strange-ness. While this year’s ads were predictably star-studded with a bunch of celebrity appearances, they also offered viewers numerous trips to what we can only describe as the uncanny valley.
We saw not one, but two commercials featuring robot dogs in a semi-successful attempt to pull on our heartstrings.
But TBH, we weren’t the only ones who thought CGI Lebron was giving Polar Express.
Trendsetter Spotlight
Superbrands find a new super screen.
This year’s Super Bowl also confirmed that brands are increasingly electing to ditch the big screen for the second one. And with this game racking up the highest price tag for ad spend to date at $6.5 million per 30-second slot, it hardly comes as a surprise that marketers are choosing other options. According to Digiday, the same spend could fund 30 days’ worth of TikTok branded-hashtag challenges or roughly 6,500 posts from a TikTok micro-influencer with ~10,000 followers.
Interestingly, this time around, companies with a previously heavily targeted millennial customer base are the ones newly participating in the shift.
One unexpected brand to opt-out of their Super Bowl slot this year was State Farm. After running their duet challenge throughout early February, the brand has officially selected three winning videos by creators to compete for a chance to win a paid trip, snag a meet-n-greet, and land a role in an upcoming State Farm commercial. The reasoning for the shift largely has to do with a changing viewership demo as a result of the shifting job market spurred by mass layoffs in the 2020 wave of the pandemic – covered in a recent TransUnion report.
“Younger consumers who lost their jobs in 2020 may have subsequently left the auto insurance market altogether, but are now gradually returning as they take on new jobs and now have a need for coverage as their transportation requirements evolve.”
State Farm’s use of a personality to create an interactive social media presence isn’t too far away from Duolingo’s mascot-reliant strategy – and is already proving to show results. In their brief run on TikTok, Jake from State Farm has not only gained enough popularity to inspire creators to compete for a meet-n-greet, but has helped the brand rack up over 200,000 followers.
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