Why watch a movie when you can co-create one? And do it on TikTok!

For the first time ever, a brand mobilized the TikTok community to produce a movie! Influencers interacted with their fans in an entirely new way: as co-stars. The plot included the year’s most viral social trends. The film attracted millions of views, 3 billion PR impressions over the holiday season, and proved how well e.l.f. speaks the TikTok language. The new product we launched in the film became the best-selling product of the season. Shortly after, e.l.f. took the #1 spot among favorite teen beauty brands.

For two years, e.l.f. Cosmetics has been catapulting itself from a top beauty brand to an entertainment hitmaker. Their original branded music ‘Eyes.Lips.Face.’ topped the Billboard and Spotify charts, they created the most viral TikTok campaign in history, and they launched the first-ever TikTok reality show.

With the holidays approaching, e.l.f. needed a way to launch a new product, and extend its credibility as an entertainment brand. How could they cut through the holiday clutter and drive new product buzz, while engaging fans in an authentic way?

Our primary KPI was earned media around the brand and the new product, with a secondary focus on UGC video creation and views.

Introducing Big Mood Big e.l.f.ing City – the first-ever crowdsourced TikTok movie.

Never before had a cast of famous influencers given the TikTok community an opportunity to co-star and co-write a movie together. Five beloved influencers put out casting calls, encouraging people to audition by using TikTok’s “duet” feature. From the hundreds of submissions, 12 lucky community members were chosen as co-stars for the TikTok world stage. Popular e.l.f. products became characters in the movie using the popular eyes and lips TikTok filter, and the iconic voice of influencer @AdamRayOkay.

To delight the TikTok community, the plotline was packed with references to the year’s most viral social trends and memes, many of which had billions of views. We ensured the movie felt truly native to TikTok by using a mix of lo-fi, green-screen, and stock video.

e.l.f. built the strategy around two key pillars: the evolution of co-creation on TikTok, and TikTokers’ obsession with stardom.

(1) TikTok was evolving past viral challenges and moving into deeper forms of co-creation like writing music and acting out scenes together. We wanted to give TikTokers a chance to take co-creation a step further -- orchestrating them to produce a “feature film.”

(2) We also tapped into TikTokers’ perpetual desire to “become TikTok famous,” giving ordinary people a chance to be seen by a wide audience. At the time, the #MainCharacterEnergy trend had over 160 million views, as TikTokers wanted to be the center of attention.

At launch time, we delighted the TikTok community with a plotline full of inside jokes from social memes. Passionate TikTokers loved the references to “couch guy,” “salmon bowl,” and more -- while others just enjoyed the fun storyline.

We achieved three waves of co-created content: auditions, launch, and new product buzz.

(1) A perfectly curated cast of influencers inspired our target audience to participate. The community “auditioned” simply by dueting their videos. We sorted through hundreds of submissions to select the 12 lucky winners! We edited them into the 9-min film, and launched it 2 weeks after auditions closed.

(2) We promoted the film like a Hollywood debut, including trailers, teasers, movie posters and billboards in NYC and LA. Celebrities like Sarah Highland promoted the movie on their own channels! Additionally, our audition winners eagerly helped promote the film, creating more unsolicited content to hype the launch and their starring role.

(3) Fans loved the new product which debuted in the movie. They started creating UGC TikToks about the product, Power Grip Primer, touting its benefits and driving organic sales at launch.

Big Mood Big e.l.f.ing City played on little screens all over the world–garnering massive buzz. We overachieved our primary KPI with 3 billion PR impressions over the holiday season.

On our engagement goal, we inspired hundreds of TikTokers to make content–both auditions for the film, and later, reviews of the new product we launched.

The community was obsessed with the film. It drove 3x longer watch times than any other post on e.l.f.’s TikTok channel, and we racked up over 16 million organic views.

And crucially, e.l.f.’s newest product launch was a huge success, with Power Grip Primer being the best selling product of the season and the #2 primer in the mass cosmetics category.

The best part: the next quarter, e.l.f. jumped to become the #1 favorite beauty brand among US teens! (Source: Piper Sandler Spring Teen Survey 2022)

Since the platform’s early days, TikTokers have always enjoyed creating collaboratively. TikTok trends and hashtag challenges are a sort of “theme and variations” -- with TikTokers making videos that react to others’ content.

We saw that, by 2021, co-creation was evolving to be much deeper. Instead of just reacting to each other, users were passing their content back and forth, creating a single piece of content together. For example, people were writing and performing songs with strangers across the world.

This new trend of deep collaboration inspired us to create an entire movie … co-created by fans!. For the first time ever, users had the opportunity to star alongside their favorite influencers and shape the plotline of the movie with their unique personas.

Hundreds of users duetted the influencers resulting in 12 users making their debut in the first crowd-sourced TikTok movie!