How to build a brand on TikTok - Sofia Hernandez

0:06Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Uncensored CMO. Now, we're going to be talking this episode about a new bit of research with TikTok, the long and the short form of it. And I'm joined by the very best person to discuss this with me, Xavier Hernandez, who is the Global Head of Business Marketing and Partnerships for TikTok. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Hi, everyone. Now, we're here in Cannes, obviously, you know, a lovely place to spend some time together. And I discovered that you've got quite a story about when your husband discovered he'd won a lion. Yes. So this is my husband, who's a creative director at an agency.

0:41His first time at Cannes. Okay. However, back in 2008, he was actually in a terrible car accident in May of 2008. And in June, won a Lion. Okay. For an incredible spot he did with Martin Scorsese. I won't go further into it. But he was in a coma for three weeks and wasn't actually able to attend. And he's never been to can since so this is 2008 and so i brought him here this year with me yes he is and we just took a photo on the red carpet which he will then photoshop his award into oh i love that so he recovered from the coma just in time to find out that he'd actually he did i know everyone jokes whether or not he came out and asked about the lion and whether but no yeah it was it was quite an ordeal but he's amazing now that was so many years ago and And what's crazy is that this is his first time here.

1:35Oh, good on him. That's a lovely moment. What's it like being married to an ECD then? Do you go home and talk about ideas together? So we're definitely the couple that watches the Super Bowl for the ads. Yeah. The kids think in advertising and marketing. It's funny. We have those conversations like, oh, this could be an ad or I could see this doing this. But yeah, we just we love creativity. And I think we love this industry, both of us very much. He's also an artist and a painter, so he definitely does things in that arena as well. Now, we're going to come and talk about TikTok, of course, but just describe your journey to here.

2:10What's been your career history today? Oh, wow. So I've been in the business for about two decades, and I fundamentally believe that our careers are a collection of experiences. And so when I hire, in fact, I tend to hire people that have not had a linear journey or a linear path, because I really believe when you can pivot into different industries or even different roles, that really makes you strong, right? It means that you can think very diversely. It means that you can like really withstand any situation and that you're always on the forefront of what's happening. So to talk about my own career, I started in advertising.

2:47advertising so in a very traditional kind of start to my career. I love people. I love understanding what makes us tick and it was either therapist or marketer right. Those were the two paths. Probably a closer fit than you might think actually. So agency world mostly global for a long time. Lived in Paris. Worked with Procter & Gamble running the Cemia region and then I decided to really move into tech and I helped a CEO named Matt Britton build a SaaS business called Suzy which was really innovating market research as we know it and bringing things into more of a real time space and practice.

3:23No more 16 month research projects. You could literally get answers within hours. So I got really excited about that, built that business. And that's what really started to build my interest in B2B. Because after my B2C experiences building the SaaS business, I realized that we're all just marketing to humans. Right. And so like, well, B2B kind of has this reputation of being like a white paper with like number signs and dollar signs and B2C is the more creative side. That's not true. And we see that at TikTok. In the end, everyone just wants to be entertained, right? And they want you to capture their attention in a really intriguing way, whether it's business or consumer.

4:04I have a theory about B2B marketing, actually, that it's actually more human than B2C. Because if you think about B2B, right, you're often dealing with groups of people directly, aren't you? Right. And often quite a small number of people in terms of making decisions. And the decisions they're making are usually very big ones. You know, not which toothpaste to buy. It's kind of which ad campaign to commission, which where to spend my media money. And that's a very, very human, you know, kind of interaction. And yet we tend to treat it like it's an annual financial statement, you know, rather than the emotional decision that it is.

4:35Well, at my time at TikTok, what we've been doing B2B on is really teaching the industry how to evolve their marketing practices. So it's a really unique B2B role, right? Thank God I have the experience of being a marketer and have worked on campaigns and worked with the biggest brands in the world because we are in a pretty significant shift, right? If you think about what social media did to the industry, what, 15 years ago, this is very different. People are expecting very different things from brands today. They're essentially expecting brands to act more like people, right? They want to engage with brands like they're one of them.

5:11And that's a very difficult thing for brands to do. They've built these very safe brand guidelines. They have legal counsel barriers that they have to go through. And so there's a big question mark with brands. And TikTok's only about six years old. I've been here five years. I actually celebrated my anniversary this weekend. So five years here. And I've watched the evolution of the industry as TikTok has entered the space. So what's changed in those five years? That's very early to be involved in TikTok. What was it like then and how does it compare now? Yeah so back then it was like hey listen there's something new here pay attention to us right that was really like 2020 year one.

5:512021 was like okay TikTok we see you let's like throw some experimental budget at you let's try this thing out and there were some early adopters like Elf Cosmetics or American Eagle or Eos and they really got it and I think what those early adopters and those CMOs really understood was they had to be in it to understand it. And today, there are still a lot of marketing leaders and their teams who are actually not on the platform, but yet still trying to communicate with their audiences on the platform. And I always say, we're very good as marketers at being students of culture, right? We commission studies, we have our teams that are experts, we have our agency partners, but we're terrible at being practitioners of culture.

6:37And so my call to action to the community right now is like, get in there. You have to be where your audiences are and really truly experience what they're experiencing to be able to connect with them. I suppose one of the challenges of that is that the people that are buying media on TikTok are not necessarily the people that are using TikTok. I mean, I did a presentation this week with Alex Earl called Creators Versus Advertisers. And we use the research that we've done together. But it's quite funny because when I was at home, my youngest daughter Lily is a massive massive TikTok follower and most of the things we do in life actually our holidays and what we buy seems to be influenced by uh yeah who she's currently following it's incredible anyway she said daddy what are you going to present at Cannes and I said oh it's like this battle between advertisers versus creators who has the biggest difference she goes duh not even a question I mean like come on like who would buy for an advert you know what I mean in her world it was you know not even a question and you know but but me probably as a sort of stereotypical person that might be making a decision to invest in the platform versus her.

7:34You know, there's a big difference, isn't there? How do you help advertisers and people that are spending money on the platform understand the role that it plays? Well, what's interesting is we did our own research to understand how the user community felt about brands on the platform. And this, it still blows my mind every time it comes out of my mouth. 71 % of TikTok users want brands on the platform. They say this is a place for brands. This isn't an age where everyone's trying to shut off ads where 50 % of people say that advertising is boring. The secret is for brands that they have to show up like one of us in the community, right?

8:10So if brands can show up like a creator, if brands can show up and entertain and engage and just not push a message out at, then they're very welcomed on the platform. One of my favorite things to see, and I'm sure you've seen this too, is when you see an ad and you scroll into the comments and people are like, wait, I just watched an ad and enjoyed it. Or wait, that's an ad? That was hilarious. When they get so excited about the content they just watch because it's coming from a brand and there's this surprise and delight. It's funny. One of my colleagues, Orlando Wood, wrote this incredible book called Lookout, which is all about advertising and how he positions it in the left brain and right brain hemisphere.

8:47Right brain advertising is what captures our attention, makes us feel something. I mean, he's a massive fan of TikTok. Almost to the extent that he would see TikTok as like the new TV in terms of that's where you tell stories, that's where you engage with people, that's where, you know, you entertain and make people laugh. And the power of that, you know, I mean, he calls it kind of right brain features versus left brain. And right brain would be storytelling and humour and music and drama and characters and those kind of things. And I think, I mean, going to the report that we've just launched together, long and short form of it, everybody download it so you can get a copy.

9:21It's for free. A lot of work's gone into it. But it's been fascinating, hasn't it? Because it reminds us again, the power of entertainment. And if we can see ourselves as entertainers rather than kind of, you know, always be selling. I mean, the bit that actually really struck me as I was kind of looking at the data is we tend to think of the long and the short as being, well, the brand building's over here. And that's kind of like, you know, the entertaining stuff. And then in the short term, we do all the kind of serious, you know, selling. but actually the entertaining content was more effective at making people convert and buy as well so it just goes to if you do if you do great content then you you win in both the long and the shorts you're making a really great point and what we're seeing on the platform is when it comes to the consumer journey that funnel is collapsing right like people may not intentionally be here to buy but they're so engaged by a creator or you know a brand even doing something very engaging entertaining, touching my heart, making me laugh, et cetera, it makes me lean in in a way that I haven't before, right?

10:23And so I think there's a huge opportunity for brands to lean into this. Let's be honest, though, it's not how they've operated in the past, right? If we think you mentioned television, if we think about how we've engaged our agency partners or even internally our colleagues to prepare for putting a message out there in mass, it's big production budgets, It's months and months of planning. It's a long process. And I just had two creators on stage, Keith Lee and Logan Moffitt, where I briefed them on the spot. Keith, a car company wants to do a commercial. These are the three things they want to hit.

11:00Go. And within seconds, he had a concept, right? And he has 17 million plus followers. He, for those of you that don't know Keith Lee, like he's a food reviewer and eats food in his car, right? It's not highly stylized like we're used to in the industry. And he has the power to transform businesses. And he's done it over and over again all over the world. That power is the power brands have. They have that level of influence. But their communities and their audiences are looking for them to connect in a new and different way. and Keith puts his phone on his dashboard and records himself. Do you know, I know all about this because probably my first experience of kind of TikTok creators with my daughter Lilia was Crumble Cookies.

11:45Do you know Crumble Cookies? Yes, of course. They're iconic, aren't they? And she just showed me these videos and it was exactly what you said. It's just literally a phone on a dashboard and it will be somebody who's just gone to Crumble Cookies and they're reviewing live, you know, kind of taking a, you know, the colors and the flavors and all that kind of thing. And then literally when I'm flying to New York for business, she'll send me the TikTok and go, I want you to pick up some crumble cookies on this day because that's when they come out because they refresh every single day. Then I get all the packaging.

12:16And I remember I had to fly through, you know, I had to go through security and on the plane and get them on the train and in the car. And then the amount of times people stopped me and said, oh yeah, that's crumble cookies. Can I have a piece of that? It just shows how the kind of like the online kind of, you know, the offline and online kind of connect like that. Yeah, it's incredible. So my husband, I mentioned earlier, he's in the industry and he said to me one day, it's like, I have to relearn everything I've been taught about marketing and advertising because it's so different today. Like you're taught a beginning, a middle and an end.

12:45Right. And we know even from the research that storytelling can start at the end first. Right. You capture someone's attention. and you know it's moving so fast and what it's requiring of brands and their agency partners is to like roll up their sleeves and just dive into it and just start playing and experimenting but again that's not our behavior either we're planners right we work within our brand guidelines and and the community today is like no just get out here just show me what you've got play around I love that you're exactly right because I you know most of us are kind of grown up with the playbook and the brand guidelines and the nine-month process and approvals.

13:23By the way, legal is very happy with those brand guidelines, right? Exactly, exactly. And yet working with creators, you've got to kind of dispense with a lot of that, haven't you? And kind of give them the platform and the opportunity to create in their own style and the freedom to go. I remember when we were chatting to Alex Earle in our presentation, I'm like, well, what one top tip would you give? And she goes, you've just got to let me run with it because I don't have three weeks to go and kind of get through your, you know, brand approval process. You need to give me the broad brief and then let me create in an authentic way myself.

13:53Right. I mean, Logan today on stage, I asked him how often he creates. He said three times, he posts three times a day. And to a brand that would like blow their mind, right? Like I have to create creative content for three, three times a day. What is that going to cost me? How am I going to do that? I don't have the team. It's not like it used to be. And it's moving so fast that brands and agencies really need to jump on and get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Totally. Now, you mentioned earlier about the branding as well. And this is another thing in the report that came out about branding in the first two seconds.

14:27But I think what people think when they think of branding is we're going to put the logo in the opening shot. If you go back to sort of your TV production, it's like, We open on the logo or the pack or whatever. But what we found in the research that was super interesting is that that wasn't actually that effective. What was effective is having like a voiceover or a bit of music or you had a character. All your product or brand was embedded naturally into the story. And kind of those things were the kind of features of a TikTok that captured attention and created emotion. And when I read that in the research and when I hear you say that, immediately I think realness and authenticity, right?

15:01So it's not forced. But I like to show a TikTok when I talk about the research and what we found of Burberry, where they just had these birds kind of fly into the air and form the Burberry logo. So it is the logo, but it's done in a creative, artistic way. You've certainly got my attention. I want to see what happens with these birds and what they're doing. And so there are creative ways. This was one of the most insightful parts of the research for me is that branding matters and branding early matters. but it's how you do it. Totally. And you referenced it earlier as well, but I think the, I mean, maybe what more traditional marketers struggle to realize is there is permission as well.

15:43There's almost an understanding that, you know, creators are partnering with brands. We know that. So you don't have to kind of hide that. And, you know, what Alex has done for Poppy is amazing. I mean, Poppy that sold for incredible$2 billion, five years after Alison appeared on Shark Tank with her husband, nine months pregnant. I mean, it's just like the most wild journey, But they really understood that working with creators and giving them that license to talk about the brand gave them a huge advantage. Right. But it's easier for up and coming brads. In fact, SMBs on the platform are masterful at it, right?

16:16Because they don't have the resources that bigger brands have. And they just kind of lean into experimentation. It's naturally, right? Like it's an entrepreneurial mindset to creativity. The bigger brands struggle with it because they've been doing the same thing for a long time. So we're in a time of transformation and change is hard for everyone. But I do see brands starting to lean in and starting to really get it. There were the early adopters, but now we have more and more brands that are like, I get it. I need to be on TikTok. Show me how. I mean, I love this because like, you know, traditionally the big brands have got all the advantages, right, in terms of distribution, awareness, brand equity, all that kind of thing.

16:52But I mean, the data really struck me. And I think there's a chart in the report that showed the difference between branding early for an established brand that was using kind of TV cutdowns versus creator-led content. And you see this boost when you kind of brand early in terms of awareness. It's up sort of two or three times for brand leaders. But for challenger brands, when they use creator content and brand early, it's like three or four times the impact in terms of brand awareness. So it looks like there's a real kind of secret sauce here. If you're a challenger brand, you can go much further.

17:24with creators than more established brands who probably benefit a bit more from kind of linking to their more traditional assets in terms of TV and doing kind of cut down versions. So it just goes to show, depending on where you are as a brand, you can take advantage. Well, I think to your point earlier with Poppy, challenger brands are just a little bit more flexible, right? They're not bogged down with the way we've done things. Well, this is the way we do things here, right? And so they're more flexible and they're very used to putting their brand in the hands of creators and letting them mold it like clay, right?

17:55That's very scary to bigger brands who are 100 years old, 40 years old, 70 years old and have spent a lot of time really shaping their brand. The biggest challenge is going to be how willing are brands to let go, right? How willing are they to let the community really take control of their brand? And I think once they can lean into that, it's magic. It totally is, yeah. I mean, you talked about, you know, creators with 17, 18 million followers and Alex got seven or eight million. It's incredible how someone today can become a creator and create that kind of following in a relatively short space of time and earn a pretty amazing living.

18:35I mean, this is something I think not everyone realizes about TikTok is you are creating an economy. You know, it's probably the size of probably a pretty significant country when you add it all together. But how big is the kind of economy that you know TikTok creates. When you think about our shops business and e-commerce and the role that's playing today there's a brand called Canva Beauty in the U.S. and this is like your everyday entrepreneur building a beauty product that they love. Last year that business made one million dollars in the first few hours on Black Friday through TikTok Live e-commerce.

19:14Second year, this year, in fact, in 2024, they upped it to 2 million within a few hours. That is what's happening today for businesses. And I would say, yes, the product is incredible. But you know what's even more incredible? How down to earth that CEO and founder is and how she shows up for her community on a regular basis. She's not overly polished. Sometimes she shows herself getting out of bed and going to the gym and admits that she's having a bad day. They want to, it's not like, let me show up as the CEO and founder. And just to make a comparison, the way larger brands can do this, I'll give you a concrete example.

19:52Elf Cosmetics, Corey Marchesodo, the CMO, she is regularly in the platform and she's listening and she's reading comments. She realized that the community started to talk about a product that was being discontinued, right? And they were in uproar, like thousands of people talking about it. And she said, let me run down the hall, see if the CEO will come and do a TikTok live right now. Right. We're not going to run this through legal. We're not going to talk to our comms department because they're very confident in who they are as a brand. So she grabs CEO, puts him on a TikTok live, and he's just listening.

20:28He's like, I'm here to listen to you guys. What's up? I'm the CEO of Elf Cosmetics. And do you know what that does for their followers and their community? They're like, thank you. You're not some big corporate structure. Like you actually do care about the people that are buying your products. And I say this a lot. People today want brands to show up like people. And if we keep talking about them as like our customer base, our, no, they're people that you want to buy your product and they want to engage with another person. So how do we show up that way? And that's the beauty of TikTok is it just, it's like, it's created this kind of level playing field for everyone, even creators.

21:06Yeah. I mean, it's a really good point. I hadn't thought about that, but you're right. The insight you're going to get live from all your audience feeding back to you in real time about what they think about your product, that's worth a lot. What a missed opportunity if they hadn't done that. And something I think people forget as well, when I met Alison and talked about her journey on Poppy, I mean, it's a wild story. So, you know, presenting on Shark Tank, nine months pregnant, and then, well, four years later, they're on their first Super Bowl. And then five years later, they've done an exit to PepsiCo for two billion, which is just like insane.

21:36But I said to her, what's the one tip you would give anyone else? And she goes, get on TikTok from day one and tell your story. And I think we forget this. I mean, obviously, we can partner with creators, of course. And that's amazing because they're giving us, you know, access to their audience and, you know, a scale. But actually using anyone as an individual, there's no barrier to you getting on there. And her initial TikTok, just telling the story of how she won on Shark Tank, which is an amazing thing to talk about, right? And it's very raw. It's very like me home wearing my normal clothes, you know, just going, hey, everyone out there, whoever's listening, I just got a deal on Shark Tank.

22:09That's been tens of millions of views. Just that. And I think she's got, I think, over a billion, you know, collective views in the five years. Yeah. I mean, I said I grew up in the ad industry. I was trained, right, in the old school way of marketing. I don't even know if in universities these books have been updated. I think we're still learning kind of the old school traditional way of marketing. And the reality is like over the last five years, especially because of platforms like TikTok, everything has changed. And what Alison has done really well is, yeah, just show up as herself. Her struggles, her joys, her good moments, her bad moments.

22:45And that vulnerability is hard, not only for brands, but for people. And so when people really lean into that, the community is like, yes, I feel you. I had that day yesterday, right? Right. So let's say, let's say, for argument's sake, asking for a friend, right? Let's say you're middle-aged, you're getting into TikTok for the first time. What are your top tips to kind of, you know? Okay, getting into TikTok to watch or to make? To make. Okay. So on the podcast, for example, we've been making this podcast almost six years. Okay. And we started on TikTok about three months ago. By the way, my top tip actually, if you're not listening, is employ somebody.

23:22We've got you guys. So yeah, employ somebody who knows what they're doing. But anyway, if you can't do that, what would be your advice to somebody that's coming to the platform for the first time and wants to make you? Yeah, I think low hanging fruit is definitely employ somebody that knows and just watch what they do, right? I think Duolingo did this really well. Like they're incredible on the platform. They have a tiny social team. They actually, I interviewed them on a podcast recently. they found the mascot costume the duolingo owl in a closet and they just started playing right and then they started posting that content and that took off and there you go that's their creative strategy right so i think one experimentation two don't overthink it just start to be vulnerable right just start doing things like you i can imagine you waking up picking up the phone just being like oh god i've got three podcasts today and i was out all night last night bye guys right that is actually true you look great um but it's it's that it's the stuff you wouldn't normally put out there that's what people like because it makes them connect with you on a different level then you're not like performing you're actually just being one of us that's i love that because again it you're not just trying to recreate your tv ad or recreate your company website you know you're doing something that's authentic and different to and using the platform for you know the behind the scenes stuff that that people would otherwise get to see.

24:49Another thing I'll add is we historically have thought about our audiences, we look at it from a demographic mindset, right? And so if I want to talk to middle-aged people who are within this race, who live in this area, that puts you into a pigeonhole when you think about creative execution, right? If you're thinking about people who love podcasts or love history or love marketing. So then you're going to talk to those communities in a very specific way, right? Like let's get out of the mindset of demographics and actually connect with people based on their likes and interests and passions. And that gives a brand so much runway.

25:30So one question to ask me, who's on TikTok? Because I guess I probably got a dated impression of it, but I mean, you know, brands in the UK, like Little Moons became very popular with kind of teenagers and that kind of blew up. So in my head, it's a sort of a, probably young teenage kind of platform but is that true now or has the platform evolved yes and right it's a plus so it is known as the gen z platform and we have plenty of that audience and they keep us fresh and amazing but our highest growing segment is 35 plus and there are so many creators even that fall into that category the old gays are really fun to watch if you don't know them.