LGBTQ+ advocates have been breaking boundaries for decades and Pride’s influence has shaped culture. Today, Pride culture is Pop Culture, influencing a broader audience beyond LGBTQ+ community.

But in 2020 due to COVID-19, Pride looked very different, with no parades or in-person celebrations. With Pride events moving online, we saw digital as a huge opportunity to help break down even more barriers for the community.

To celebrate Pride, TikTok created #MyPride livestreams, featuring 25 LGBTQ+ Trailblazer creators. Our job was to spotlight these creators in culture to drive engagement and tune-in, with the ultimate goal of increased brand likeability, changing perception of content from frivolous to meaningful, and raise in-app donations for LGBTQ+ non-profit organizations.

We joined forces with the media and created a Cultural Crossover, bringing the best of media and pop culture to TikTok and the best of TikTok to pop culture.

Popular talent from various media partners participated in TikTok livestreams and conversely, we brought TikTok Trailblazer creators and their TikTok content to the media platforms.

We strategically matched each of the 25 TikTok creators to a media partner based on their personalities and content type. We featured two gay moms and their families on Romper, a family website. We brought a transgender makeup artist, who uses the platform to express creativity, to Elite Daily, a millennial women’s platform. And we gave a comedian a digital stage to share his funny content on Buzzfeed.

To celebrate all of the Trailblazers, we created editorial hubs to feature all 25 creators on both LGBTQ+ and pop culture websites.

With only $1 million USD, we made media magic, celebrating 25 Trailblazer creators, across 12 media partners, 50+ pieces of custom social, video and editorial content.

We took over social, partnering with Eilte Daily, Romper, Buzzfeed, NowThis, and Pop Sugar, to share nine custom profile videos.

We created a one-hour livestream on TikTok with talent from VH1’s RuPaul’s Drag Race, pairing them with four Trailblazer creators for a heart-to-heart, eye opening discussion on their experiences and LGBTQ+ struggles. We promoted it with tune-in messaging in-app and the talents’ social handles.

To land in endemic and pop-culture media, we created content hubs on Conde Nast’s LGBTQ+ property them and on Pop Sugar, profiling all 25 creators. These were promoted through partner social as well as homepage drivers to the content hub.

Finally, we ran supporting digital media and a Pride playlist takeover on Spotify, and ran pre-roll across endemic sites.

We nailed it.

We saw success across multiple key performance metrics - views, social engagements, livestream tune-in, positive sentiment, and most importantly brand perception and fundraising.

TikTok saw a +8% increase in brand likability in the weeks immediately following the Pride events.

We helped drive 1.5 billion views of #MyPride content on TikTok. If you’re wondering, that’s a lot. This view count was on par with the global sensation #DuaLipa and the top trending song #SaySo.

We also generated 2 million+ social engagements, 5.4 million+ social video views, and a 96% social sentiment.

Our one-hour livestream broke TikTok’s in-app viewership records, driving 166,000+ unique viewers, 28,000+ new viewers, and a 36-minute average – the longest to-date for TikTok.

The campaign also helped raise awareness of TikTok’s in-app donation stickers, which ultimately raised $3 million for LGBTQ+ organizations.

Not bad for less than a $1MM USD media budget.