Brief:

• TikTok began a year-end campaign to highlight this year's top 100 trends on the social video app that became a breakout hit. The #YouMade2019 marketing push is running on other social platforms, including Instagram and Twitter, and features short videos that showcase the platform's diverse communities, per an announcement shared with Mobile Marketer.
• TikTok's top 100 list consists of 10 categories that highlight the most popular viral videos, memes, artists, celebrities, breakout creators, dance trends, creative effects, pet videos, beauty and style videos and sports highlights. TikTok worked with adam&eveDDB New York on the campaign.
• David Dobrik and Nick Uhas, who both rose to fame on Google's YouTube, posted the most popular video on TikTok with a viral clip of people in lab coats making a massive batch of "elephant toothpaste" with a chemical reaction. The video was viewed 179.8 million times and received 17.4 million likes, per TikTok's app.

Insight:

TikTok's year-end campaign highlights the top creators who helped to turn the social video app into a worldwide sensation and Mobile Marketer's Disruptor of the Year. China's ByteDance heavily promoted TikTok on other social media platforms, helping to drive more than 1.5 billion total downloads from Apple's App Store and Google Play, according to a November estimate from Sensor Tower. The researcher said TikTok was the third-most downloaded non-gaming app after Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Messenger. The app has 26.5 million monthly active users in the U.S., roughly 60% of whom are between 16 and 24 years old, per Reuters.

By highlighting its creators, TikTok aims to cultivate stronger ties with influencers who can easily abandon the app and monetize their content on other social media platforms like Google's YouTube or Facebook's Instagram. Because TikTok's feed uses an algorithm to highlight videos in a feed, anyone can gain overnight fame without having any followers. While the TikTok 100 includes popular YouTubers, it also features creators like Noen Eubanks, who posted his first video in September 2018 and now has more than 7 million followers on TikTok and 2.2 million on Instagram. That popularity led Kyra TV, a YouTube media company aimed at Gen Z, to partner with him on creating original shows, Variety reported last month.

TikTok is testing features to help creators monetize their following, including the ability to embed social commerce links in videos, but didn't reveal plans on when the feature will be more broadly available. In August, the company teamed with the agency WeQ Influencers to provide brands access to native ad campaigns featuring content creators on the platform.