Trident gum had struggled to connect with Gen Z, which had largely turned its back on the crowded chewing gum category. The brand hadn’t been a meaningful part of youth culture for years, and hadn’t broken through on TikTok, where much of Gen Z develops relationships with the brands they love.

To appeal to Gen Z, Trident collaborated with Sour Patch Kids, a cult-favorite candy, to create a new product: Trident Vibes Sour Patch Kids gum. Trident Vibes Sour Patch Kids delivers a bold pop of flavor, designed to change your vibe when you chew. They tasked us with bringing this energy to life on TikTok.

Our primary objective was to drive awareness and trial of Trident Vibes Sour Patch Kids, among social-first Gen Z consumers who don’t regularly think of Trident or consider gum. Our secondary objective was to create a first-of-its-kind social experience, to generate deep engagement.

Our audience loves fashion, and having its voice heard. Trident Vibes Sour Patch Kids delivers a bold flavor vibe. TikTok had just launched TikTok Live, and we saw this as an opportunity to create a first-of-its-kind social experience for Gen Z. We invited TikTok users to design a bold piece of fashion together, in real-time, using the comments field. Whatever vibe the people wanted, they would get.

We started with a blank jacket design, and over the course of an hour, whatever people suggested in the comments was immediately reflected in the design in real-time. Shark fins, 3D bubbles, glitter fabric, fringe, a secret pocket to hold gum–any and all vibes were possible and welcome. After 1 hour, the design was locked, no matter what it looked like, and 140 of the jackets immediately “dropped” on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Our target audience was Gen Z social natives who hadn’t considered Trident or the gum category as relevant to their lives and interests. Our approach was to create an activation that added value to a platform where they were actively engaged in culture creation–TikTok. We knew that it wasn’t enough to simply create interesting content for the platform. We needed to do something surprising and innovative that would get them to stop scrolling and want to participate.

On TikTok, Gen Z loves fashion and having their voices heard. Our product is all about bold flavors and vibes. We focused on developing an idea that would encourage Gen Z to be their boldest on TikTok, and explore new flavor vibes through the lens of fashion.

This activation was incredibly simple from a user standpoint, and incredibly complex to implement behind the scenes. There were five major components:

A user interface that seamlessly integrated with the native TikTok Live interface. When users landed on our live-stream, they saw a “blank” white jacket, and instructions to make design suggestions in the comments field. As they made suggestions, the design immediately changed. It was elegant, and deeply satisfying to users to see their suggestions immediately reflected in the design.

A natural language processing engine that “read” comments as they were typed, and translated them in real-time into visual designs that appeared on the 3D model. This included a complex weighting system that detected when certain design elements became “popular,” to accurately reflect the will of the people.

A 3D design element library, pre-populated with thousands of possible design choices, in every possible color permutation, with an emphasis on brand colors. If a user suggestion matched an element in the library, it was immediately implemented. If not, a team of designers was on-hand to immediately modify a library element accordingly, on the fly. The result was a perfectly seamless experience from a user standpoint.

A 1-hour-long live video stream, combining our 3D jacket render and livestreams of three TikTok fashion influencers, who engaged with user comments in real-time. The influencers appeared above the 3D render, and commented on the evolving design throughout the experience.

The fabrication of the custom jackets, which included unusual, never-made-before elements like translucent bubbles and hidden gum pockets. Each of these elements presented a design problem that needed to be solved in real-time.

During the 1 hour live-stream, 86,333 TikTok users participated in helping to design the jacket, creating 7,000 unique design permutations. Most of these participants were net new users for the brand, who had not engaged with Trident on social before, and sentiment among users who engaged with the activation was overwhelmingly positive. The activation generated 49 million+ unique impressions, and once the jackets dropped when the activation ended, all 140 jackets were snatched up in 11 minutes.