ISLA’s CEO analyzes how TikTok is reshaping creativity, marketing and audience engagement.
“Capture value” is no longer the main currency in the era of short-form video. With less time to show yourself as a brand, anti-creativity is no longer welcome, writes Mariano Serkin.
We all know that the rational reason we open a social network is leisure — to text others or to consume information. But technology for business purposes has done its own work, exploring these triggers that lead users to log into social platforms and turning them into spaces of interaction where brands activate the advertising and marketing tools available to them.
With massive communities on each platform, different canons have emerged on how to present campaigns and sales or brand-launch strategies. The oldest of these is social media marketing, the “mother” discipline that all marketing tools rely on, dating back to when brands first entered Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and now platforms like TikTok.
Within social media marketing, we have reached the “TikTokification” of brands — the result of a frantic adoption of communication styles and strategies by companies seeking to connect more effectively with audiences on the platform.
With marketers increasingly focused on TikTok, concepts such as “For You,” “Following,” “Live,” and “For Business” have all become part of a single vocabulary.
At the same time, we see a growing search for actions that deliver results inside the platform, where digital marketing has embraced the trend of short-form content thanks to its massive popularity and multimillion-user impact.
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TikTok’s scale speaks for itself: one billion users globally, with 92% of them taking action after watching a video, and 37% ending up making a purchase.
The need to belong to the endless-scroll community is clear when we look at brands like Duolingo, who turned Duo — the brand’s famous owl — into a permanent TikTok character.
Zaria Parvez, Senior Global Social Media Manager at Duolingo, even acknowledged that the success of the owl’s presence on TikTok began when they realized that if users were on the platform’s billion‑user feed… they were *not* inside the language‑learning app.
This has led to interesting cases where creative strategies have evolved and even brought flavor profiles to TikTok. XXtra Flamin’ Hot, a special edition of Sabritas’ snacks, turned the hashtag #PokerFaceFH into a challenge where users tested their ability to stay expressionless while experiencing the product’s extreme heat.
TikTokification is recalibrating marketing strategies and generating phenomena such as “TikTok First,” where the app reports a 37% purchase intention rate and 38% brand preference — all declared by the platform itself.
Achieving the consumer engagement required by a brand adapted to the TikTok phenomenon means recognizing that audiences on this platform not only connect emotionally with brands — they also *participate* in the product, transcending their role as simple advertising targets and co‑creating alongside companies. This allows us to view the relationship between content platforms, brands, and audiences as an interconnected ecosystem.
Incredibly, we have gone from foot traffic in shopping malls to the continuous scroll as the new standard for consumer discovery. If, as a brand, you’re wondering how to approach the TikTok Economy, the answer is the same as in the real world: your brand must have an “add value” mindset, because that is the platform’s core appeal.
“Capture value” is no longer the primary currency in the era of short‑form video, because with such limited time to show what your brand is about, anti‑creativity is no longer acceptable.