How 2021 taught Gallery Media to quickly adapt its TikTok playbook

In the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Harwood discusses creating a team of creatives who could quickly adapt the company’s playbook for the ever evolving platform, as well as how the editorial successes inform the brand campaigns posted to TikTok, and vice versa.

Highlights of the conversation have been edited and slightly condensed for clarity.

Finding a healthy balance of organic and paid posts

[The] majority [of our posts are] organic, but we’ve definitely dabbled [in paid promotion for our brand partners.] We’ve done it before ourselves, too. We truly believe brands are built on social and we double down on this ethos for ourselves and our partners. Even if a PureWow piece of content is taking off organically, and consumers have shown us through their behavior that they think this is a great piece of content, then why wouldn’t I boost that and try to get more eyeballs on it for my own brand?

We do the same for some of our brand partners as well. We’ll boost an organic piece of content and get it out further. But because we’re not a media buying agency, we don’t ever do a self-serve ad buy. We’re basically boosting organic content that is doing well, that’s going to help them get more followers and make them have a very healthy TikTok page. 

Making fast edits to the playbook 

We were of the belief in the early days on some of these influencer campaigns that [we should] create a song and have all the influencers do the same thing because it might create a ripple effect, then you might get [user generated content] and everybody starts copying. And that worked actually twice for us. We had two huge wins like that and then we did it more and it quickly expired, meaning consumers got hip to it. And they’re like, “I’m not doing this. I’m not copying like a brand’s dance, or anything that these influencers were paid to do and they’re trying to get everyone to do that.” So we had to course correct pretty quickly after having one or two campaigns that we didn’t see that breakthrough virility, even though we were seeing it at first.

Allow influencers and creators to steer the campaign ship

Let the creators make the brand the hero in the video [in a way] that they believe is going to resonate best with [with their audience]. Of course we have to give them some guardrails and some direction, not just complete creative freedom, but let them create. That’s what they do best. And let them [give] a lot of creative direction to us — not [us] give them the stringent guardrails or a script. If you try to script them, or tell them exactly what to do — which is what we were doing prior — it was a win at first that became a loss and we had to innovate on it quickly because it was no longer working on the platform.