TikTok is a breakthrough social media platform with millions of mostly young users worldwide, who share short videos and funny clips with matching music.  Lately, its popularity has skyrocketed, with artists like Khloe Kardashian, Ariana Grande and Britney Spears taking on to the platform. The Chinese App reached 1.5 billion downloads late last year and has caught the attention of brands around the world.

TikTok

The appeal of TikTok is mostly among Gen Z, who love music, weird behaviour, humour and fashion. They love the blend of a social media network which is focused on consuming and creating viral content, along with catchy music.

Gen Z

TikTok, whose Chinese owners are worth billions now, wasn’t the first-of-its-kind app but became a runaway success due to its unique format. Music biggies became early adopters of the TikTok format, using creative techniques to magnetically lure viewers and ensure it goes viral.

Worth Billions

Now that TikTok is a force to reckon with, many luxury and fashion brands are trying to tap the spending power of youngsters who are hooked to the addictive app. Recently Mac Cosmetics launched an online challenge, encouraging users to transform and showcase their looks using their products. Ralph Lauren and Burberry managed to garner around a billion views for their respective TikTok challenges.

Commercial Viability

TikTok is a huge social media space to scout new fashion and modelling talent, as it provides a glimpse at the personality of the rising star and not just a pretty face. The number of followers and the search buzz the TikTok artist creates can be easily measured.

Scouting Talent

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As TikTok moves into shoppable content, could every teenager's favourite video platform be the future of luxury marketing?
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My introduction to TikTok was at 1am one night last summer. My next-door neighbours had left their teenagers home alone, and they had spilled out into the garden with a dozen or so friends. With my bedroom window open, I could hear the same 15 seconds of a song that I didn't recognise - played on repeat. Again and again, and again.
For those of you without teenage neighbours -or teens of your own - TikTok is a social media platform where users share short videos, usually set to music. Many include face- or voice-altering filters, or are responses to 'challenges' spread virally via hashtags - last year, one such challenge involved arranging Haribo gummies to look like an audience for an Adele song playing in the background.
If that sounds childish, the fact that 66 per cent of TikTok's global users are under 30 may explain it. Scroll through the app, and you'll see that the majority of 'trending' content is made by teens - although one of my colleagues shared the profile of a friend's 80-something father telling jokes to camera phone, with a view count of 265,000. So far, so playful. But the sheer numbers that TikTok is bringing in - in November last year, the app reached 1.5 billion downloads - have inevitably caught the attention of big business.
Ten years ago, the social media giant Instagram began unassumingly enough, with slightly blurry pictures of food, but is now a scaffold for luxury fashion commerce. Today gummy bears, tomorrow Rolex watches - and if that seems like a leap, #rolex already has 335 million views without any brand intervention. Clearly some brands think TikTok is the next big thing - Balenciaga, ever the early adopter, 'teased' the launch of two new bags on the app in December. Last month, Prada invited 15-year-old dancer and TikTok star Charli D'Amelio (28.6 million followers) to sit front row at its Milan show, next to Derek Blasberg. 
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It's certainly a way to reach young consumers on a grand scale. TikTok is owned by Chinese internet tech giant ByteDance, a company founded in 2012 by Zhang Yiming, who is now 36 (and, according to Forbes, worth $16 billion). ByteDance itself was last valued at $78 billion in late 2018. The Chinese version of TikTok is called Douyin - the two apps are basically the same, although the latter caters to China's more stringent censorship practices.
But the app wasn't the first of its kind, nor even the second. Twitter owned the app Vine, on which users shared six-second looping videos (among the most watched were a child mistaking geese for chickens, a potato suspended from a circling fan, and teenagers dancing), launched in 2013. It had 200 million active users by the end of 2015 but was shuttered in 2016. Factors behind its closure included the launch of Instagram video; Vine 'stars' moving their content to YouTube, where they could monetise it; and the difficulty of marketing a six-second video as an advertising tool. TikTok absorbed lip-synching app Musical.ly (and its 100 million monthly users) in 2018, in a rumoured $1 billion deal.
That musical element is key to TikTok's shareability - and it also demonstrates its commercial potential, at least for musicians. Last July, 20-year-old American rapper Lil Nas X set a new record for consecutive weeks (17) at the top of Billboard's Hot 100 chart with his song Old Town Road, thanks in no small part to a viral TikTok meme, in which users' everyday clothes were replaced by rodeo garb, in time for the song's drop. In November, Arizona Zervas's song Roxanne was in seventh place on Spotify's Global 50 chart, again following trending as the soundtrack of a meme on TikTok.
For luxury fashion and beauty brands trying to tap into the spending power of Generation Z, TikTok may hold the secret. Cosmetics giant Mac launched a 'transformation' challenge on TikTok during New York Fashion Week last September, encouraging users (and paying a few) to share beauty transformations using its products. 
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Considering that this was a commercial campaign, branding was minimal - the hashtag, #youownit, didn't even include the brand name. 'Branding was subtle to encourage more organic participation,' says Philippe Pinatel, senior vice-president and global general manager of Mac Cosmetics. The campaign reached 500 million views in three days, a record-setting 1.5 billion in six, and 2.6 billion to date. Even so, as the campaign was not actually linked to product, its impact on sales can't be measured.
For Mac, TikTok's appeal is that the company 'identified it as a content creation platform versus social media network', says Pinatel. 'In general, Mac is one of the biggest beauty brands on Instagram and one of the first to launch on Facebook, so we have a proven first-to-market track record.' But while teens have been turned off those traditional social media sites - considering Instagram too staged and filtered, and Facebook just too old - TikTok's perceived 'authenticity', and the seemingly limitless freedom it gives its users to 'create', appeal to Gen Z. Millie Harper-Bailey, a teen fan of the app, also uses Instagram and Snapchat but especially loves TikTok because it uses music from the charts, and 'because the content varies - there's loads of different things you can watch or do'.
In the fashion sphere, Ralph Lauren garnered 780 million views with the #winningrl TikTok challenge, launched during the US Open in August 2019. Videos of young actor Diana Silvers on the tennis court asked TikTok users - who the company called 'the next generation of consumers' - to share their own 'wins', from shows of athleticism to a recent entry of a well-topped ice-cream cone. Burberry's #tbchallenge, which asked users to form the new Thomas Burberry TB monogram with their hands, tipped over a billion, including views on Douyin. 
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Clearly, then, there's an appetite for luxury fashion content on the app. Brands could harness that potential to build hype around fashion shows and collection launches, although they may find content hard to control: in February, TikTok footage of the new catwalk collection, apparently taken by a Dior seamstress, was circulated on the app a month ahead of the show - the type of leak no fashion house would welcome. Anyone with access to a camera phone has the potential to go viral on TikTok, whether a brand wants that content seen or not, whereas Instagram is more carefully regulated, and a post's visibility depends on algorithms that seem to favour paid-for content.
Models, many of whom are in their teens and have huge social media presences, could offer similarly candid clips of shows or shoots. Surely it's only a matter of time before savvy designers - and luxury e-tailers such as Matches Fashion and Net-a-Porter - begin to use the platform.
TikTok is currently experimenting with shoppable content, and Instagram's successful shift into such posts suggests it might appeal at least to Gen Z-ers. It's also trialling a redesign that looks strikingly like the latter app, which has an older demographic, something that TikTok must chase to survive. TikTok is also reportedly in the process of recruiting a CEO in America (Yiming will remain CEO in China), working alongside American general manager Vanessa Pappas, who previously worked at Google and YouTube, in a move to strengthen its Western hold.
In the meantime, even as TikTok refines what it does, and brands work out how to harness its potential, it is visibly creeping into fashion boardroom strategies right through to model casting.
'Social [media] is basically treated as an additional portfolio for our models and talent,' says Ifrah Arshad, PR director of model agency Linden Staub. 'Brands now require more than traditional beauty - they're looking for talent, a personality to align themselves with that speaks to their customer. We're being asked for social handles and follower counts, and we know they're searched for. It's become such a vital part of the casting process, which is why our team uses both [Instagram and TikTok] to scout talent.'
In December, French luxury fashion house Celine launched its latest campaign. Previous collections have been fronted by the likes of writer Joan Didion, actor Margaret Qualley and top models Daria Werbowy and Binx Walton. 'Portrait of a Teen Idol: Noen Eubanks', a series of photographs shot by the brand's creative director Hedi Slimane, starred an 18-year-old TikTok star from Atlanta with 9.8 million followers. The brand doesn't currently have an account of its own, but the campaign imagery was shared widely on the platform and other social media channels. Though whether a blue-haired teenage boy can sell &#163;5,000 handbags remains to be seen...
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As TikTok moves into shoppable content, could every teenager's favourite video platform be the future of luxury marketing? My introduction to TikTok was at 1am one night last summer. My next-door neighbours had left their teenagers home alone, and they had spilled out into the garden with a dozen or so friends.

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It's time to
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