Dive Brief:

• Sweetarts is hosting a branded film festival on TikTok, encouraging young filmmakers to submit their creations, per a press release.
• The festival is being promoted with the help of actress and TikTok creator Xóchitl Gómez, known for her roles in “The Baby Sitters Club” and “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.”
• The theme of the festival is “Be Both,” which has been an ongoing campaign by the candy brand since 2019. In total, four winners will be chosen across four categories: Best Expression of 'Be Both,' Best Story Time, Best Use of Video Tools and Best Colorful Creation. Each winner will receive $25,000.

Dive Insight:

Sweetarts’ new TikTok film festival is the latest initiative in its ongoing “Be Both” campaign, which was launched in 2019 with messaging catered to Gen Z’s values of diversity and inclusion. The integrated campaign has often utilized social media to reach younger audiences, making the ByteDance-owned platform a logical choice to host the festival, as an estimated 43% of the platform’s billion-plus monthly users are between the ages of 18 and 24.

Sweetarts is a brand under the Ferrera Candy Company, which the Ferrero Group acquired in 2017. 

The film festival, which is open for submissions between Aug. 12 and Sept. 7, will also encourage the creation of user-generated content. Deploying consumers to supply the content may help to naturally expand the brand’s reach on the platform, which has proven to have a large, untapped, advertising impact. This year, marketers are expected to spend $774.8 million in influencer marketing on the site.

"Starting with our name and fully captured in our motto of 'Be Both,' Sweetarts believes powerful results are unleashed when you combine things that are seemingly opposite, like our unique Sweet and Tart profile," said Jennifer Brownson, Sweetarts senior brand manager at Ferrara. "The Sweetarts Film Fest on TikTok celebrates the seemingly contradictory combination of the everyday and impactful content, the powerful result of which is certainly worthy of its own film festival."

Gomez, who has over 6.9 million TikTok followers, will be announcing the winners during a live-streamed award show on Oct. 6 on her TikTok channel.

Other brands have undertaken similar initiatives, including Bush’s Beans, which encouraged users to create bean-related content with cash prizes and a chance of having the video turned into a commercial. During the holiday season, E.l.f. Cosmetics produced a meme-laden “movie” on TikTok and released it in several short installments in an attempt to catch the attention of users.