We focus on ads that any brand could comfortably reproduce, but we couldn’t possibly ignore this 10-minute behemoth of a TikTok. You wouldn’t typically expect such self-aware content from a company with yearly revenue exceeding 8.7B, but Hilton comes out of the gate talking about the TikTok inauthenticity conundrum that all brands are facing. What follows is a roller coaster of native content, creator features, brand personification, historical anecdotes, competitor attacks, a bit of humility, and an all-out assault on the fourth wall — breaking it too many times to count. It stays true to so many of the TikTok tactics we see performing, and executes on the level that only the budget of a Fortune 500 company can afford. We’d love to get performance data on this one to see if teasing rewards actually got people to stay until the end, but that’s not gonna happen. Entertaining, ambitious, and probably (definitely) not feasible for 99.9% of brands out there. This branding TikTok has all of the amenities, but pricing options are out of just about everyone’s range.
