Announcing the UK winners of the TikTok Ad Awards 2023!
It's the moment you've all been waiting for! Last night at a glittering ceremony in London, the TikTok Ad Awards 2023 were presented to the brands and agencies across the UK that are leading the way on TikTok with creative, high-performing campaigns.
Each winning campaign tapped into TikTok in a unique and entertaining way, leveraging our platform's culture, community and ad solutions to engage audiences and smash campaign targets. Together, these brands give a masterclass on what it takes to win on TikTok, showcasing the campaign strategies and ad formats that drive remarkable results.
Read on to find out who won and dive into their outstanding campaigns.
Greatest Creative
This award recognises brands that have the courage to redefine the boundaries of creativity on TikTok.
Lidl | OMD UK | Accenture Song | Coolr
Driving a conversation and growing brand love with a custom jingle.
Lidl harnessed TikTok native tools, engaging the community in an entertaining way and making the audience feel like part of the brand's fabric. For this interactive campaign, they leveraged the popular Open Verse Challenge TikTok trend where they encouraged viewers to duet the video, but with a twist: the song opening is a remix of a popular N-Trance song, with lyrics taken from consumers' online comments. Using TikTok tools and filters, the brand created an authentic campaign that included TopView Ads, Top Feed Ads and In-Feed Ads.
Driving over 19.5 million impressions, an astonishing 39% view-through rate and a 32.3% uplift in ad recall, Lidl's playful campaign is proof in the power of TikTok-first, sound-centric creative.
"We loved this entry because it made really good use of the creative and creator tools on the platform. It had community at the heart, it was built for sound-on and it was overall really joyful and playful." - Tim Pritchard, Head of Content and Responsible Media at MG OMD
Greatest Performance
This award recognises the measurable impact of paid TikTok campaigns, highlighting the brands that harness TikTok to smash their lower-funnel objectives.
PureGym
Growing customer numbers with a full funnel strategy.
PureGym wanted to increase reach and grow its member base at a lower cost-per-acquisition, so they took part in the TikTok Creative Exchange programme to develop 20 pieces of creator-led content that leveraged trending sounds and special effects. The videos were then set up in a full-funnel approach consisting of reach, traffic and conversion campaigns using In-Feed Ads, Spark Ads and Interactive Add-Ons.
PureGym's rigorous test and learn approach reaped impressive results with a reach of over 10.9 million, a 77% reduction in cost-per-completed-payment and an incredible 26,000 new PureGym members, proving the effectiveness of an always-on, full-funnel TikTok campaign.
"The winner has delivered on [...] efficiency and effectiveness and really stood out as a well deserved winner, congratulations to them." - Hamid Habib, Chief Experience Officer at Havas Media Network
Greatest Small Business
A brand new category this year, this award celebrates the brands with fewer than 50 employees that leveraged TikTok ads to achieve their campaign goals and drive real-world results.
Healthxcel Ltd.
Skyrocketing sales with native Spark Ads.
Pharmacist-run brand, Healthxcel, demonstrated the power of authenticity on their TikTok journey. Business owner Rima Deu started off with no real knowledge of running ads, but had seen incredible success from her organic posts. Using this as a springboard, she leveraged Spark Ads to increase reach and nail targeting, enabling her to reach a larger, relevant audience.
Rima filmed all ad content directly in the app, using TikTok features to edit clips and add sound, for a smooth ad creation process which garnered outstanding results. Since creating ads with TikTok, Healthxcel gained over 2 million impressions and 29,000 conversions, equating to a 400% rise in sales. This equated to a 400% rise in sales.
"To us, it felt like TikTok was totally game-changing to their business, changed the whole scope of what they were capable of doing" - Vic Banham, Antler Social
Greatest TikTok
This prize is awarded to the best overall campaign: the campaign that really tapped into TikTok's community, creativity and trends to inspire joy and create a cultural moment.
Glow For It Ltd. | Develop Digital
Cultivating a community and driving sales with a consumer-first content strategy.
Small business owner of Glow For It Limited, Daisy Kelly, speaks directly to the camera to capture her audience with transparent messaging addressing real customer queries. By using the "reply with video" TikTok feature to respond to the community's comments, Glow For It interacts with their audience to build trust and boost engagement. After the success of this organic strategy, the brand then sought to increase reach and engagement by taking the best performing content and boosting it as Spark Ads and In-Feed Ads.
With a 9% purchase rate and a ROAS which more than doubled their benchmarks, this TikTok campaign has had a significant effect on the business. Thanks to TikTok, Glow For It sold one month worth of stock in 48 hours, launched 12 new SKUs, hired 9 employees and moved into a full-time office space, embodying the saying "what starts on TikTok doesn't stay on TikTok".
"We loved the authenticity, the entrepreneurial story [...] this winner transformed their business. TikTok acted like rocketfuel - the impact was massively tangible" - Paul Kemp-Robertson, Contagious Co-Founder
Special mentions were also awarded to the following campaigns:
Greatest Small Business Uni Compare | Clearing: Call UK Universities
Credits: 360 OM (media)
Greatest Creative Mother London | Reese's UK
Credits: Mother London (creative) + UM (media)
Greatest Performance SHOUT by UniTaskr | UniTaskr
Credits: SHOUT by UniTaskr (creative + media)
Greatest TikTok Amazon | Amazon Books
Credits: Droga5 (creative) + Initiative (media)
Thank you to our jury:
Paul Kemp-Robertson - Co Founder, Contagious
Vairi MacLennan - Head of Content, Mother
Martin Beverley - Chief Strategy Officer, adam&eveDDB
Luke Abbot - Social Director, BBH London
Tom Curtis - Executive Creative Director, EssenceMediacom UK
Tim Pritchard - Executive Director, Head of Content and Responsible Media, MG OMD
Eddie Adedeji - Managing Partner, Publicis Media
Hamid Habib - Chief Experience Officer, Havas Media Group, Deputy MD, Havas Entertainment
Elizabeth Darley - Head of Planning, iProspect
Lauren Ogúndèkó - Chief Digital Officer, Initiative UK
Vic Banham - Co-Founder, Antler Social
Michaela Broad - Director of Commercial Partnerships, Croud
And a huge congratulations to our shortlisted entrants, who all delivered exceptional campaigns on the platform and helped us make last night so much fun; we're excited to see what you do next! You can check out the UK shortlist here.
As the winning team of the Greatest TikTok UK, Glow For It Ltd. will travel to Amsterdam on 30th November to compete in the European Grand Prix against the best campaigns from DACH, France, Italy, Spain, Nordics and Poland, to see who will be named the European G.O.A.T. We can't wait!
