ESCP ALUMNI magazine - Special Issue 2022 - 43

Career ❙ Interview
Then a couple of days later, another video
of mine reached 1 million views. I remember
sitting alone on the side of my bed, thinking
to myself: okay, so let me understand what's
going on here. I'm a random 18-year old guy
from Germany that nobody knows about...
so why am I getting all these people to look
at my content? It just seemed too good to
be true. Anyways, after a couple of months,
I had garnered about 40,000 followers.
This was a pivotal moment for me and I
thought to myself: okay, either I take this
seriously, as a creator, or I find another way
to monetize my know-how about TikTok.
Thankfully, I decided to go for the second
path. In the following months, I decided to
position myself as a TikTok marketing expert
on LinkedIn, posted interesting learnings
and updates about TikTok. Most importantly,
I started connecting with people that were
also interested in the marketing potential
of TikTok - marketing departments from
big FMCG & D2C brands, marketers from
Germany's biggest creative agencies, CMO's,
etc. After a while, I started giving workshops
to local businesses, where I would come to
their company for a couple of hours, and
I would just explain to them: this is how
TikTok works, these are your advertisement
options, here are some cool cases from
American brands, and here are some ideas I
have for you guys. After doing this in summer
2020, I then teamed up with my soonto-be
co-founders from PlayTheHype.
You've produced one of the most successful
campaigns on TikTok Germany in 2020.
Could you walk us through the process?
Our first inbound client ever was funny-frisch,
which is actually Germany's
biggest chips brand. They came up to us
after having read about us on LinkedIn and
approached us with the following problem:
« We're losing our market share within the
age groups 14-24. We need your help to
understand and leverage TikTok, quickly
adapt trends to our brand & make funny-frisch
the Gen Z " lovebrand " it aspires
to be! » So, even though we were still in
the project phase and didn't know exactly
where PlayTheHype was headed, this
huge German brand still wanted to team
up with us and give us the full experience of
being a marketing agency. At the time, we
hadn't even accumulated enough money
to get our business licence, so this gave us
the necessary seed money to start our own
LLC in Germany. All of a sudden, we had
a goal. We wanted to show the marketing
world in Germany that a bunch of 17,18 and
19 year-olds could do better campaigns than
everybody else. We also wanted to prove
to ourselves that we were capable of doing
marketing, without ever having studied
marketing or worked in marketing before.
And that's exactly what happened. At the
end of 2020, the CEO of TikTok Germany
crowned the funny-frisch campaign " the
most influential European TikTok campaign
ESCP Alumni Magazine Special issue ❙ 2022
the platform had ever witnessed " . This was a
huge breakthrough, not only for us but also
for TikTok. We had generated about 1 billion
campaign views for funny-frisch, which was
astronomical for 2020 standards. We actually
did a brand lift study to see how effective
exactly this campaign was for the brand,
discovering some incredible results. So, for
example, the KANTAR study said that at
the end of the campaign, we had a 23.3%
increase in purchase intent and an 11.5%
increase in brand awareness. The gamechanger
was the fact that there was an actual
increase in people buying funny-frisch
products after the campaign, which was
astonishing for a company that is already
generating billions of euros each year in
Germany alone. They were blown away and
TikTok was the perfect platform for them to
market their product. So, after securing funny-frisch
as a long-term client on the very
first campaign we did, we started getting
2-3 cooperation requests a week from other
big (mostly FMCG) brands, also reaching
out for our help. So, this is what we've been
doing for the past year.
We've had to
convince so many
of our clients that
it wasn't going
to destroy their
brand reputation,
if they used the
word " bro "
or " sis " when
responding to
comments in our
comment section.
❙ 43
ESCP ALUMNI magazine - Special Issue 2022

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