• by Colin Kirkland , August 9, 2024

TikTok’s most recent attempt to attract the entertainment industry to its platform involves a new promotional solution called TikTok Spotlight, which invites brands to tap into fan communities while simultaneously promoting films, TV series and franchises.

“TikTok Spotlight identifies applicable TikToks on our platform and attributes an anchor link,” the company explains in a blog post. “The link drives audiences to a dedicated landing page where they can discover more details like synopsis, cast, official accounts, and a collection of other creator content linked to the same title, allowing fans to explore the fandom and conversation around the title.”

The ByteDance-owned company says that “the best-in-class TikToks” will be amplified across the platform “and beyond,” including TikTok socials, educational materials, and event touchpoints.

Spotlight campaigns can also feature gamified calls-to-action to the creator community to create related TikTok videos in order to unlock custom in-app elements.

In directing studios to “think like marketers, but act like creators,” TikTok is providing a way for them to step directly inside fan communities, while receiving an analytics dashboard with insights into the studios’ chosen fandoms so they can better understand how to activate around their film or series.

TikTok says its Spotlight dashboard “is able to look at the platform, identify title content, and track how it’s performing, who is engaging,” while spotting developing trends and conversations in real-time, ultimately “providing studios a birdseye view of the community.”

“Studios can also see how their IP is being used and decide which content to protect and which to offer copyright cooperation,” the company adds.

Warner Bros. has utilized TikTok Spotlight to help promote “Dune 2” via a curated search hub, movie anchor and detail page, as well as a gamified call-to-action to the creator community, which invited them to make and post TikTok videos to unlock Dune-branded profile frames for their avatars.

TikTok says that this “Dune 2” Spotlight campaign became the top driver of traffic to the ticketing hub during the film’s opening weekend in March. The studio itself posted 164 clips to “Dune 2’s” TikTok account prior to the theatrical debut, while fans created over 260,000 Dune-related videos.