TikTok has announced the winners of the inaugural TikTok Awards UK. Chosen by a panel of some of the ad industry’s leading innovators — including creatives, planners, performance specialists and more — the awards were hosted on November 24th, celebrating the brands that have most successfully made TikTok their own and produced the highest-performing TikTok-native content marketing.
“Over the last few years, the content brands create for TikTok has evolved tremendously,” said head of brand partnerships, Niusha Koucheksarai at the ceremony. “In the beginning, we saw more fixed assets based on edits of cutdowns of TV ads, or adapts. Today, we’re seeing a far broader range of brand content, produced specifically for TikTok, to take advantage of the platform’s immediacy and authenticity. We wanted to recognise some of the really great work brands have been doing on TikTok. That’s what these awards are for.”
Where creativity meets authenticity
The winner of the ‘Greatest Creative’ category was Tesco’s Voice of the Checkout campaign from BBH. Using TikTok Duet, Tesco invited members of the public to audition to be the new voice of the Tesco self-service tills. As well as talking in time with a loveable and quickly speaking checkout, users were asked to explain why theirs was the right voice for the job.
Within 24 hours of launch, the content had been viewed more than five million times — without, at that point, any paid promotion. In total, the campaign achieved 43 million views. 
Almost 3,000 people entered the competition — which was covered in national broadsheets and tabloids.
“Being successful on TikTok means immersing yourself in the platform. The best brands earn their right to show up on the FYP by putting in the hours and understanding the community and creativity that make TikTok unique” explained Vairi Maclennan, head of content at Mother, and one of the judges. The judges felt that Tesco's Voice of the Checkout did just this, rewarding the campaign's understanding of the TikTok culture and the Tesco brand's role within that culture.
Using TikTok’s performance advantage
TikTok offers brands a measurable performance premium. A recent study of social analytics found that TikTok’s engagement rate was higher than any rival platform. The ‘Greatest Performance’ category celebrates brands who understand the platform, and its audience, well enough to use that performance premium to maximum effect.
Judges were looking for a campaign that achieved significant reach, influenced consumer behaviour in a significant way, and met the specific objectives the brand set out to achieve. The category winner, Johnny’s Chop Shop (SLG Brands), did all those things.
The campaign’s TikTok featured celebrity barber and brand ambassador Elliot Forbes explaining different brand products. The brand team encouraged engagement with the TikTok community, creating videos which featured Elliot demonstrating how to use different hair products and answering community questions face-to-face.
The campaign clocked up almost 24 million views, nearly nine million of which were organic. It enabled Johnny’s Chop Shop to achieve significant sales growth, helping the brand to its best sales week in seven years of trading. During the campaign, Johnny’s Chop Shop saw a 52% uplift in brand awareness.
The judges were particularly impressed by the campaign’s strong organic performance. “Creativity is always subjective,” said judge Tom Curtis, executive creative director at MediaCom UK. 
“And even in a performance category, there are different ways to interpret results. For example, a massive reach number might sound impressive, but it isn’t so much if it’s all paid for.” One of the things that the judges found so striking about this campaign by Johnny’s Chop Shop was that it owed a great deal of its performance to the way its authentic content really struck a chord with the audience.
How brands are bringing joy to their followers
The ceremony concluded with the presentation of the ‘Greatest TikTok’ award. It recognised the campaign that best embodies TikTok’s ethos of marrying creativity and bringing joy. The judges were looking for an entry which demonstrated conclusively what brands could achieve on TikTok by bringing joy to their followers.
The winner of the ‘Greatest TikTok’ award was Channel 4’s Altogether Different campaign. Designed to promote Channel 4’s role in fostering diverse and exciting new voices, the campaign took as its starting point the insight that TikTok is a place where the overwhelming majority of users (76%) feel comfortable expressing their true selves — and where they love to discover new culture.
The campaign riffed on one of the hottest TikTok memes, “tell me, without telling me”. Channel 4 invited its viewers to celebrate and showcase their differences, using the “tell me, without telling me” format. The response was massive, with 287,000 users uploading 827,000 videos, all showcasing their unique talents and personalities. These were viewed a staggering 9.2 billion times, surpassing all the targets which both Channel 4 and TikTok had originally set for the campaign, and demonstrating the power of TikTok as a complimentary channel to TV.
The TikTok Awards EU Grand Prix
As winners of the ‘Greatest TikTok’ category in the UK, 4Creative and Channel 4 will now fly to Amsterdam to compete in the EU Grand Prix ceremony, bringing together other winning campaigns from across Europe to compete to be named the overall ‘Greatest TikTok’ in Europe.
You can find out who takes home the grand prize by following the TikTok for Business TikTok account, or on LinkedIn here.