The Objective
The Athlete's Foot, a global retail chain specializing in brand-name athletic shoes and owned by Accent Group across Australia and New Zealand, engaged the TikTok team to develop a creative and fresh way to drive brand awareness and consideration for the launch of the new ASICS Gel-Kayano 28s. With the shoe already having significant recognition in the running community, the team wanted to clearly convey to the customer why they should purchase the sneaker at The Athlete's Foot over its competitors.
Keen to show its point of difference in the market, The Athlete's Foot focused its communications on how the brand has access to exclusive colourways, a 30-day fit guarantee, and its unique selling point of having a legacy of being fitting experts since '76.
The Solution
The TikTok team wanted to keep its creativity on theme and focused on running, so it decided to create a compelling narrative on the platform that would deliver against all key objectives. To do this, the TikTok team creatively reimagined the For You Page as a virtual race track and asked Australians to 'Katch the Kayanos', the ASICS Gel-Kayano 28 shoes, by scrolling through their feed and finding creator @sarahmagusara wearing them - for a chance to win the new shoes. By leading with Sarah Magusara, one of the top Australian TikTok creators, the campaign generated significant press coverage.
As people moved through their For You Feeds, the advertising placements acted as signposts with different In-Feed Ads encouraging the community to continue to scroll to race to the finish line. A lucky few in the community who got to the final ad placement then had the chance to win a pair of new ASICS Gel-Kayano 28s. Across the campaign, The Athlete's Foot used One Day Max In-Feed Ad placements to ensure continuity of the story across the community's For you Feed. To end the race, the final ad placement used a Lead Generation ad format to encourage the audience to enter to win the pair of shoes.
By leveraging the uniqueness of our platform, The Athlete's Foot was able to creatively communicate and engage with our audience across multiple ad placements. To support the campaign, the team also worked with TikTok creators @alexis_bree and @zaraliang to develop fun, organic content to go live following the For You Feed race, creating authentic feeling TikTok videos and increasing appeal. The brief was open enough for creators to put their own spin on the content, but tied together well with the overall key messages, resulting in strong engagement.
This was the first time any Australian brand has built out sequential storytelling using multiple advertising formats on TikTok across the For You Feed.
The Results
This campaign delivered for The Athlete's Foot both on and off platform. On TikTok, 'Katch the Kayanos' had an impressive 8.5 million impressions, with a 4.8% average CTR and a strong engagement rate of 5%. Overall, the campaign generated 2.7 million in reach, with the community watching the content for an average of 8 seconds, smashing the benchmark.
Off platform, The Athlete's Foot saw total sales of the sneaker increase by 9.9% compared to the same time last year. The addition of this new and innovative TikTok campaign to the marketing mix strongly contributed to these results.
The campaign also had significant positive results for the creator activity, with an impressive average engagement rate of 11% and combined total views of their content reaching 900,000.
