The filmmakers behind Sony’s Bullet Train asked us to activate their film on TikTok. So we put one of the film’s side characters, a nameless mascot, front and center. We took this side character from the film and developed them into a full TikTok personality from scratch, serving as the spokesperson for the film on the Gen-Z-dominated social platform.

Sony tasked us to launch a TikTok channel for their new summer film Bullet Train. The problem was, we wouldn’t be able to get time with any of the A-list talent in the movie. So we made our own talent instead. To do so we created an entire TikTok account based around a mascot costume that appeared in the film for only a handful of scenes. By creating a personality for this mascot, we were able to build a channel from scratch in the 3 months leading up to the movie that could interact with fans, duet popular videos, and even stitch TikToks from some of those busy A-listers.

The key to this campaign was developing Momomon’s character. In fact, the Momomon mascot is only on screen for less than a minute. We developed a “unique” personality (psychotic but in a cute way) to give us a way to participate in TikTok conversations, trends, and sub-communities in a way that felt entertaining and surprising. Inspired by the film’s dark humor, we crafted Momomon as a clout-chasing narcissist using the movie release to become more famous. This framing allowed us to interact with TikTok in a way that felt natural to the platform, while still being fun and a little ridiculous.

Building loyal fans is key for a movie’s success, but this can be difficult with new movies where people don’t have an attachment to the characters. To create new fans and build hype, we made a character who was already a big fan of the movie (because she was in it.) This allowed us to engage with fans and co-stars alike and create new fans before the movie even released. Also because our character “spoke” using a text to speech tool, we were able to localize this for various languages.

To capture and grow an audience on TikTok, we launched the Momomon TikTok channel the day the “Bullet Train'' trailer was released in mid-April 2022. As we had three months until the film’s release in August, our goal on the channel was to sustain and grow the audience’s interest in the character and the film by tapping into the strengths of TikTok. Week by week, we developed content made specifically for the channel, using native trends like ASMR, reaction videos, and text-to-speech that the platform’s algorithm would favor. We also tapped into current cultural trends that Gen-Z loves - like tarot card reading. Through this executional approach, we were able to grow the channel to about 11.57k followers and 316.1k likes despite the content being centered around an unknown character who appeared on the trailer for less than 5 seconds.

We developed a 4-month TikTok program that generated anticipation and an engaged community surrounding the release of Bullet Train. As our assets gained in organic reach, we worked with our media partners to Spark the best performing videos, driving further engagement. More important than metrics, the comments showed our community was loving our refreshing take to a movie release and our content was giving real entertainment value to our audience. Comments like “I’ve watched this exactly 96 times” to “AAAAAHHH U ARE SO CUTE PLEASE MOMOMON ADOPT ME ❤️❤️.”

Within 7 days, our follower count grew from 400 to 34,000, growing to over 115k followers.

We surpassed the TikTok engagement rate industry benchmark of 4.1% with an average 12% Engagement Rate over the course of only a 4 month rollout period.

We generated 73k average views for all content.

We garnered a total of 3,094,973 total views on the channel.