The goal of the campaign was to raise awareness to Trevor Daniel on the platform TikTok. As we were starting to see some organic traction prior to our involvement (around 2,000 videos created to one sound and approximately 4,000 videos created to another original sound). Although most of the content was very scattered without a clear direction for a narrative, we believed we could create a movement between both sounds to drive traffic between each-other and help spark momentum.

We came up with two original narratives to be activated upon: the “awkward stare challenge” and a “nostalgic movie” narrative. The awkward stare challenge plays with the definition of cringe and challenges users’ comfortability with interacting with one and another. For the nostalgic movie narrative we’d have users react to heart-breaking scenes from movies they love, whilst using the song ‘Falling’ to enhance the experience of those scenes and by the end of the video, show their genuine reaction to those scenes.

Both narratives had a low barrier of entry, were open enough for users to be creative around as well as being relatable enough to want to get involved in. The awkward stare challenge become a collaborative movement between friends; and the nostalgic movie narrative made it simple for anyone to join in without having to involve multiple people.

From having decided on the narratives, we chose to quickly present it to an internal focus group we had gathered to see what the reaction would be between the demographics we were looking to target. Seeing their positive feedback, we chose to move forward. From there on, we sourced creators that we saw to be most fit for the campaign, both in terms of the demographic of their audience, their brand alignment with the artist, similar trends and songs they had been involved with in the past and potentially helped originate movement around, as well as those most fond of the song.

Once the initial creators had been involved in the campaign we started tracking movement within the platform to see where to potentially pivot towards (both in regard to creative narrative and distribution of budget). Mid-way into the campaign, we chose to increase the attention for the trend that was starting to form (around 3,000 videos per day after the first week of activation) through activating multiple meme communities on Instagram that we believed would ignite further interest in the audience that we already believed had consumed the content on TikTok.

We wanted to go for a holistic approach making the movement feel like it was transcending the platform and transitioning into multiple communities to validate the trend we were trying to create.

A few weeks later, the sound was building with between 30,000 and 40,000 videos per day, making it grow into a viral and unstoppable force. When we got involved with the song, it had only a few million streams on Spotify and fewer than 8,000 videos created on TikTok.

Today, the song is close to 900m streams and has more than 5m videos on TikTok across multiple sounds and has become one of the biggest stories globally in regard to the power that TikTok has as an enabler for new emerging artists.