R3’s Greg Paull speaks to the Association of National Advertiser’s Matthew Schwartz on the opportunities and challenges of TikTok.
In order to gain control online you must lose control. It’s long been a signpost for brand marketers navigating the social media terrain. Nevertheless, most brands managers continue to deploy command-and-control strategies when it comes to leveraging their social marketing efforts. You can hardly blame them, what with the brain police online ready to pounce on any marketing message or piece of creative they deem offensive. But in order to monetize TikTok, the video-sharing social network that is all the rage, marketers may have to bite the bullet.
“Now more than ever this is the medium where you need to lose control,” says Greg Paull, co-founder and principal at independent consultancy R3, whose clients include American Express, SONY, and Unilever, among other major companies. “You can put out the templates. You can put out the content. But you need to leave it to the consumers to do the creativity for you.”
Paull estimates that up to 80 percent of brand marketers have yet to invest in TikTok, but expects that percentage to fall this year. “There’s still a lack of awareness and knowledge base, in terms of what TikTok is doing and some of the case studies they’ve produced,” he says, adding that it would behoove CMOs to download the app on their smartphone posthaste. “When you start to see some of the case studies (such as Chipotle’s #GuacDance challenge) you’ll start to see the business opportunity.”
