Sony Pictures Italia

The Objective 

World famous entertainment studio Sony wanted to promote the release of its new film Bullet Train. As the latest movie from the director of Deadpool 2, David Leitch, and the on-screen return of megastar Brad Pitt, the brand wanted to run a big awareness campaign. So, what better place to turn than TikTok?

The Solution 

The brand launched a long-running In-Feed Ad campaign (starting in early June with the first trailer release and ending after the movie release at the end of August) with a video view objective, and partnered with a large pool of creators to create native content that really spoke to the TikTok audience.

Co-ordinated by the TikTok Creators Solution team alongside agency Open Influence, this was the biggest creator campaign activation for a single movie title ever implemented by an Italian movie distributor. More than 15 different creators were asked to interact with a specific movie clip featuring film stars Brad Pitt and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and show their own personal style to promote the title. 

The creators delivered a diverse range of videos – from acting and comedy videos to movie trailer reviews from film-buff profiles – that were posted on the creators’ accounts and later boosted as Spark Ads content. TikTok’s stitch and duet feature enabled a huge number of people to engage and interact with the content in an extremely creative way, producing user-generated content that further boosted awareness of the campaign.

The Results 

Overall campaign impressions came in at 59.7 million, with 8.8 million driven specifically by the creators’ Spark Ads campaign. When Sony compared the results of the creator ads against the brand ads, it saw a 28% decrease in cost-per-mille for the creator ads, a 66% decrease in cost-per-video-view, a *26% increase in click-through rate, and a smashing 211% increase in engagement rate. This proved the success of using TikTok native content and leveraging the power of creators on the platform.