What we learned from running the very first Afrikaans TikTok ad

It became abundantly clear in the second quarter of 2021 that the advertising power of TikTok could not be denied any longer. As an agency, we needed to add the ability to understand TikTok and run ads on the platform to our toolkit as quickly as possible. More than any platform that has come before, TikTok encourages engagement and incentivises regular users to become creators through its immersive algorithm and friction-free platform. By making use of TikTok’s unique capabilities and advertising products, Lumico launched the very first Afrikaans TikTok ad in 2022.

The number of users on TikTok exploded globally over the last few years, fuelled even further by the global pandemic resulting in 1 000 000 000 users reported in the first half of 2022. This is a growth of 325% year-on-year and has resulted in TikTok being ranked as the sixth most-used social media platform according to We Are Social’s 2022 Q1 report (Digital 2022: Another year of bumper growth – We Are Social UK, 2022).

Growth in South Africa saw a similar uptick with ByteDance (creators of TikTok) reporting 6,44 million users in 2022 Q1 (Digital 2022: South Africa — DataReportal – Global Digital Insights, 2022). Music creators in South Africa especially have seen exponential growth on the platform, with local star Amapiano garnering 1,6 billion views in 2021.

Lumico received the brief to promote a popular cat food brand in South Africa, driving brand awareness across different platforms and keep this popular brand, widely available in grocery stores, top of mind for consumers. The videos, conceptualised and produced by Lumico, played on the idea of Tinder for cats. Because the playfulness of the format and concept, we took the videos to TikTok as our main digital channel, promoting via their in-feed advertising placement.

The campaign also included paid advertisement campaigns on both Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and YouTube. Taking the budgets comparatively, TikTok accounted for 49,54% of the total impressions garnered by the video, followed by Meta at 40,65%. Similarly, 50,5% of the total link clicks to the website can be attributed to TikTok, followed by Meta at 18,49%. This places TikTok’s CPM at the lowest of the three platforms, with Meta next at R1,27 more, and YouTube at a whopping R33,74 more.

Comparing these three platforms on their brand awareness advertising offering and on impressions gathered at the most affordable rate, we are really impressed with the results garnered by our very first Afrikaans TikTok ad. Meta is still an affordable option, at a slightly higher cost, but TikTok completely outperforms them on traffic to the website as a brand awareness objective.

The ad was published with English subtitles to make it as accessible as possible to a broad audienceThe reception by the TikTok community towards the Afrikaans ad was overall positive, with a comment here and there that expressed surprise at encountering Afrikaans media on TikTok. We even received a comment or two in Afrikaans!

Bibliography

DataReportal – Global Digital Insights. 2022. Digital 2022: South Africa — DataReportal – Global Digital Insights. [online] Available at: Accessed 4 June 2022.

We Are Social UK. 2022. DIGITAL 2022: ANOTHER YEAR OF BUMPER GROWTH – We Are Social UK. [online] Available at: Accessed 4 June 2022 .