Taking a retail giant into the world of TikTok

ASOS is the market leader in the UK but a challenger brand in the USA. In fact, in the American market there’s debate over how to even pronounce the brand name. For the record it’s, ”Ay like in play then sauce” – which we started off by including in our TikTok bio. With “sauce” being a youth expression for great outfit this then gave the heart of our TikTok challenge, “show us your A-sauce, B-sauce, C-sauce” i.e. your three best looks. Putting our brand name right, in a non-obtrusive but clear way, at the heart of doing what young people loved, showing off their new threads. Now we just needed to enable them to do this in a creative, brand-friendly way.

TikTok is a rare “sound on” channel, known for breaking some of today’s biggest hits, so we went “sound first” – crafting a bespoke track with KARM that gave the platform’s legion of creators a beat to cut their outfit changes to. In addition, we created an interactive “branded effect” that allowed creators to transition between outfits with hand actions (peace sign and hand palm) and flair. To get people participating we launched the “hashtag challenge” by working with 28 popular U.K. and U.S. Creators, such as @abbyrartistry, @estare, @elmo, and @lorengray, to kick off the challenge and provide inspiration for users to follow while also building the credibility of ASOS’ brand presence on the platform.

Globally, the campaign recorded over 1.2 billion video views in just 6 days, with 488,000 videos created and 167,000 users taking part, all of which exceeded expectations. On top of that, the creative achieved an engagement rate of 15.79%, well above benchmarks. ASOS commissioned a brand lift study for the campaign, and the results were also very impressive. The campaign achieved a 25% increase in aided brand awareness and a 10% increase in brand association with being “trendy.” Ad recall also saw a 50% increase.