In the Swipe era, we have almost forgotten that, only recently, our social media platforms were nothing more than a string of images and text. Everything was static, and our thumbs were just getting in their first workouts: first vertically, then laterally. Today, they lead a life of their own, and instinctively swipe through the apps that rhythm our lives. These stiff beginnings, a mirror of their interface design, were a bounty for established players. Big brands and big means captured the attention of the largest audiences for long periods of time (comparatively).
This brings us to the Tiktokocene, a term that describes the platform’s aesthetics and codes, dictating the trend cycles and the evolution of social media, up to the perception of war. Indeed, if TikTok managed to establish itself as a generator of new cultural codes, it is above all thanks to its ability to captivate young people’s attention. The app amounts to more than 3 billion downloads around the world, with far greater engagement rates than Facebook or Instagram. It has already influenced the culture: it remodeled language, transformed dance moves into social currency and established vertical video as standard.
NEW WAY TO EVERYTHING
If director Hayao Miyazaki advocates for “ma”, these moments of pause allowing for breath in the story, TikTok’s dynamic is strikingly different. It is a place where “we don’t have the right to slowness or silence.” Indeed, if we are still able to catch up with our whole timelines on Instagram or Twitter, TikTok provides an endless and constantly renewed personalized content stream. A shift from the traditional homepage to the ForYouPage. An ideal set up in a context of the immediacy of on-demand services, embodied by the phenomenon of speed watching or listening, of series, videos, or even podcasts.
TikTok goes a step further, as even its content is built in speed mode, with short formats, but also the #spedup music trend gathering more than 10 billion views on the platform. Beyond the fun and entertaining aspect of it, the super high-pitched, catchy voices and noises do grab an ever more fleeting attention span.
SZA releases a sped-up version of her hit on Spotify.
Now that it has become the space for creation and sharing of “youth culture” codes, TikTok is now able to compete with the biggest players of various sectors. For one, with search, as Google admits to be losing ground to TikTok and Instagram. Yet, more impressively it’s in the entertainment playground that TikTok is expanding its influence. Already ahead of YouTube in time spent per month, the platform should rank second behind Netflix in terms of daily use by 2024, across generations.
TikTok is an unmissable player of the attention economy: when it comes to SVOD with a short film festival, and more recently with the launch of their series offer, but also with video games, as they’ve just organized their first professional event around gaming “TikTok made me play it”, positioning themselves as Twitch’s direct competitor.
In the campaigns:
- With its brand platform “What you love is already on TikTok”, the social network is proclaiming itself as a culture maker of today and tomorrow.
- TikTok becomes the official partner of the 2023 Paris Book Festival, making BookTok a serious player in the contemporary literary scene.
- Spotify maintain a playlist “Do you get the reference?” regrouping all TikTok’s trending songs.
The Quick Reads:
- Why Is Gen Z Talking So Fast? Zoomers Explain TikTok’s Need for Speed - The San Francisco Standard
- TikTok va-t-il détrôner Google en tant que moteur de recherche ? - La Réclame
- TikTok Series : Un Nouveau Moyen de Monétisation Pour les TikTokeurs - Leptidigital
- TikTok s’apprête à diffuser son tout premier évènement Gaming - Siècle Digital
THE KEYS TO THE KINGDOM
While rising can appear to be easier on TikTok than on Instagram, numerous content creators and brands are looking to take ownership of the platform. The task could not be more difficult, as being successful on TikTok is largely based on its unpredictable nature. When Instagram allows to gather a community around content curated to please it, TikTok goes on a whole other route. “The number of followers does not really matter”, it is above all a question of successfully integrating the algorithm’s personalized recommendations.
On a platform that favors action, it is necessary to learn to surprise, and constantly renew one’s content: using the 10 min format to promote hotels or even associating skateboarding and skin hydration to promote an iconic moisturizer. If big brands manage to follow the rules, TikTok gives the opportunity for smaller ones to make a statement. As said in Le Monde, TikTok is “a viral grammar that everyone practices but no one masters”. Something on which conventional marketing has little control. We watch young teens succeed in saving their family’s business or launching a best-seller. The latest success story was of car dealer Clancy’s Auto Body. Nothing could have predicted that this company would become popular, but its account already reached more than eight million likes in less than a month of existence!
If a video’s success is clearly random, and the key to achievement an undecipherable black-box, one thing is certain. To rise above the noise while also avoiding backlash, any over-calibrated brand discourse should be left aside, in favor of submitting to the present moment’s dictatorship.
Comments under a Cisco’s video
In the campaigns:
- With content custom-sized for the platform and a humorous tone, Quechua wins the challenge of modernizing its image.
- The boat trend mysteriously makes people gain thousands of followers with just one video, an unexpected windfall for small businesses.
- The small ear jewelry brand Nébuleuse that first became popular on TikTok is now sold at the Galeries Lafayette.
- A TikTok that Kylie Jenner filmed in her car sparks debate over her performative authenticity.
The Quick Reads:
- How TikTok anti aesthetic is shaping our world - LA Times
- Ils sauvent les commerces de leurs parents grâce à TikTok - Capital
- TikTok un tremplin pour les entreprises - Les Echos Business
AN ETERNAL REINVENTION
A social network’s power is measured through its impact on reality. Just as Instagram has coded the aesthetic of restaurants and hotels around the world, TikTok also influences entire industries, starting with music. In the studio, but also on stage where decors and screens are verticalizing. Artists take choreographies and trends from the app, like singer Rosalia and her famous chewing-gum, creating a loop in which the audience films and reshares the content. The code appropriation happens in journalism too. On top of big media groups creating accounts, the usual media channels are also adapting. For example, the BBC News chose to relaunch their TV channel and adapt it to the TikTok generation’s codes. For more authenticity and modernity, journalists are now encouraged to film on their smartphone and to let go of formal dress code.
On another note, TikTok also knows how to improvise itself as an R&D department, pushing brands to make their offer evolve. In the US, Chipotle added two items to their menu that were food hacks at first, after the demands for them exploded in their restaurants. Is TikTok is becoming an inescapable cultural player?
The question calls for reflection, but some tensions are already appearing, even among the network’s aficionados. If some accuse the app of making occidental kids stupid, others are alerting on the pressure TikTok can exert. Seeing the expanding influence it is gaining in the musical industry, artists are denouncing the obligation to make viral content. The same goes for consumers who are exposing the negative influence of filters, especially Bold Glamour, which is AI-generated, as well as the over-consumption produced by trends. Since the beginning of 2023, we have witnessed an unprecedented movement of de-influencing, a rejection of mindless consumption and of influencing. This trend, amplified by the algorithm, question our relationship with influence. From owning up overconsumption, the inflation context leads us to a more reasonable consumption and rejecting the codes of a bygone era. Nonetheless, we are still far from a de-growth revolution. Over the first three months of the year, TikTok has already made 205 million dollars more from in-app purchases than all of the other networks put together. At a time when the USA and the EU are conferring to decide whether TikTok is a risk for national security, the question of brands’ presence on the platform remains unanswered.
In the campaigns:
- EA quickly inserts a famous TikTok meme in its Sims 4 game: cool for some, “so millennial” in the opinion of others.
- Publisher Robert Laffont organizes a literary contest on TikTok to discover their next YA writer.
- Dove opposes the filter Bold Glamour in the campaign #TurnYourBack.
The Quick Reads:
- Young kids are bringing TikTok memes to the playground - Washington Post
- Booktok relance les ventes de livres - Radio France
- Des artistes dénoncent la pression des labels pour faire le buzz sur TikTok - BFMTV
- « De-influencing », la nouvelle tendance anti-consumérisme de TikTok - L’ADN
PLANNER POV
Tiktok proved that it knows better than anyone, how to capture users’ attention. Of course, we can’t help but question their famous signature “A window into the world”. We could be tempted to criticize and consider the app as just another addiction, “available human brain time” lost every day. But scroll after scroll, we must admit that TikTok transcribes the world as it is. A world that is polarized between Shein haul addicts and people who question capitalism. Hope and solidarity existing along excesses and narcissism. It draws an even more brutal reality, but it allows users to create common references. It comes with no surprise that countercultures thrive on it. There can be found the defining traits of culture according to Stuart Hall: a common way to interpret the world that allows two people to understand each other.
PARTING THOUGHT
Initiative Paris’ Strategic Planning Team
Thank you for reading Culture Jamming #3.