The Objective
With an assortment of more than 3 million articles and more than 6,800 brands, OTTO is one of the largest German online shops. As part of its transformation towards a platform business model, OTTO is currently opening to even more brands and partners.
As Christmas approached in late 2019, OTTO came to TikTok with a new mission: they wanted to spread their brand message further and make an impression on young German shoppers, at the same time, showing off their fun side. Therefore, they decided to consciously leave their "Brand Comfort Zone" in order to create a campaign appropriate to the target group and the channel.
The Solution
Together, OTTO and TikTok created a festive-themed campaign designed to not only reach record numbers of Gen Z shoppers, but spark a light-hearted video trend.
To encourage as many people to engage with OTTO’s Christmas campaign as possible, a unique Branded Hashtag Challenge Plus (#FREUDICHHART, which translates as “Rejoice Hard”) was launched by some of the most popular Creators on the platform. Thanks to the new TikTok Creator Marketplace, OTTO had access to thousands of TikTok’s most influential Creators – including Falco Punch, Pralina Karina, and Theo Carow – all searchable by campaign relevance, whether that be reach, topic, or geographical location.
Based on a festive theme highlighting the unusual and surprising gifts exchanged around the holidays, the Hashtag Challenge Plus called on the TikTok community to share their reactions to presents chosen by a Branded Effect "gift generator." Working like a slot machine in an arcade, the Branded Effect displayed a rolling selection of gifts on screen, pausing only when users held out their hands.
Including selfie sticks, salami, Christmas jumpers, and kebab grills, the gifts ranged from the ordinary to the outrageous, and resulted in some truly original (and hilarious) content. The gift generator also encouraged users to accompany their videos with an up-beat Christmas-themed sound clip, adding to the immersive experience of the challenge.
The Hashtag Challenge Plus is different from a regular Hashtag Challenge because it features an additional challenge page. For OTTO, the challenge page featured products, a survey and extra click-through options. The challenge page was also boosted by a TopView Lite (Brand Takeover) advert, which showed a creative OTTO video featuring some of the humorous reactions that can occur when you receive an unexpected gift. The video was presented to all users when opening the TikTok app, as well via an In-Feed Ad, displaying the same video natively as users explored other content from around the TikTok community.
The Results
Launching on December 15, 2019 and running for five days leading up to Christmas, the OTTO Branded Hashtag Challenge Plus campaign attracted more than 250 million video views and saw an astonishing level of engagement from its Gen Z target audience.
By partnering with key Creators found through the marketplace to give their challenge the kick-off it deserved, OTTO’s campaign saw more than 95,000 user videos generated by 44,000 participants, with an incredible 13.8 million interactions (including likes, comments, and shares).
The TopView Lite and its fun, eye-catching OTTO-branded video attracted more than 8.25 million impressions, with a high click-through rate of 19.62% to the challenge page – far exceeding the benchmark range.
The Hashtag Challenge page itself was viewed over 1.7 million times, while the Discover page banner yielded 11.85 million impressions.
For OTTO and for TikTok, this campaign outperformed all expectations, promoting real interactions with its key target audience while also generating a huge amount of feel-good content directly linked to the brand.
OTTO had this to say of their Branded Hashtag Challenge:
“Alongside our agency, Dept, we enjoyed innovating together to bring some Christmas cheer to TikTok. The results of the campaign speak for themselves and underline the ability of TikTok to be a platform partner for OTTO,” said Irina Zeiger, team lead for social media at OTTO.
