The majority of users and creators on TikTok are women. It’s a platform where they feel seen and heard, so they are comfortable sharing their authentic selves in their videos and comments. This makes International Women’s Day a key moment to not only celebrate but also grow the TikTok community on a global scale.
For IWD 2022, TikTok and their creative agency AKQA Amsterdam wanted to build on the success of the previous year’s music industry themed campaign by showcasing a wide variety of TikTok’s diverse female trailblazers. Once again, they enlisted LEAP’s integrated production teams to help them connect with worldwide audiences through our transcreation, localisation and versioning services.
#BreakTheBias and Build the Community
The International Women’s Day theme for 2022 was #BreakTheBias and this underpinned TikTok’s IWD goal of getting users to seek out more of the amazing female creators and communities on their platform. They wanted users to explore new content and voices, to go beyond their feed and search for more than what they usually follow.
The digital and social campaign features short video clips of TikTok trailblazers challenging stereotypes of gender, race, religion, and disability and inspiring creativity through art, sports, gaming, comedy, music, fashion, health, activism, beauty, and entrepreneurship. The campaign content shows how TikTok represents and reflects a broad range of countries, cultures and communities.
By presenting itself as an inclusive, welcoming space for all women, TikTok could maximise the appeal for audiences, new and old. As well as showing video clips, playful sticker graphics, text animation and voiceover encouraged engagement while hashtags amplified important themes.
But, in order to reach audiences across global markets, TikTok needed LEAP’s integrated production teams to bring the campaign creative to life.
International Voices Speak their Truth
TikTok users want to hear from real women; they value honesty over commercialisation. Finding the right words and international voices to represent the brand was crucial to landing the campaign message in local markets.
LEAP’s centrally managed Language and Culture team worked with our global network of copywriters to provide translations and transcreation for scripts and on-screen text in Spanish, Italian, French, Arabic and German. Our local market experts, guided by our Transcreation Account Managers, understood the nuances of audience, platform, culture, and language to craft the copy and make it truly resonate with TikTok’s core GenZ markets worldwide.
LEAP’s producers and transcreation account managers worked closely to organise the casting, recording and audio mixing sessions. They selected women in local markets who would represent confident, energetic and authentic native voices able to speak to a diverse audience within those local markets.
Providing in-market voiceover session directors overseen by LEAP’s transcreation account managers not only made sessions run smoothly, maintaining accuracy and ensuring effectiveness, but it also helped maintain cross-market consistency.
Creative Comes to Life
LEAP’s collaborative and agile approach across our integrated teams enabled complete control over the production and versioning process. In conjunction with our Language and Culture team, LEAP’s Film and Post team worked closely with the ad agency’s design team and producers to online edit the master creative as well as adapt and localise the videos for three different aspect ratios and five language markets.
The final element of TikTok’s IWD marketing mix was the digital marketing campaign. LEAP’s digital studio produced multiple banner formats for eight languages including Arabic, Turkish and Urdu. Our hand-coded approach to animation provided maximum compatibility across international websites thereby ensuring clients could get the most from their media plan.
Geopolitics and Brand Safety
TikTok and AKQA Amsterdam trusted LEAP to serve as brand custodians throughout the localisation process. This was particularly important when shocking geopolitical events presented an unexpected challenge to brand safety. Production for TikTok’s global IWD campaign was already underway when, in February 2022 Russian airstrikes and ground forces mobilised against Ukraine.
TikTok, like many other companies, suspended their advertising as well as some of their operations and services in Russia. Campaign elements for other parts of the world which had been planned to incorporate Russian content and audiences also had to be altered. LEAP needed to react with speed and flexibility to respond to the resulting production challenge.
Brand, agency and LEAP’s Language and Culture team worked together to carefully consider campaign messaging and hashtags to avoid misinterpretation amid shifting global conversations. In the run up to the campaign launch, LEAP’s integrated production teams supported our clients by applying the final adjustments necessary for brand safety.
Global Campaign. Local Resonance.
Every day, trailblazing women of TikTok are speaking their truth, breaking down barriers and bringing all sorts of people together. LEAP was thrilled to help TikTok bring that message to a global audience for International Women’s Day.