When TikTok debuted in 2016, another app had already stolen the hearts (and eyeballs) of millions: Music.ly.

In 2017, Music.ly was acquired by TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance. In 2018, Music.ly’s accounts were migrated to TikTok. You might say the rest is history: Fast-forward five years, and TikTok is now a global juggernaut, boasting 1 billion active users worldwide.

While it has prompted data security concerns and even talk of a federal ban, TikTok has also spurred competing products, namely Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. Marketers are increasingly interested in short-form video, typically defined as 60 seconds or less: About one-third of social marketers plan to invest the most in short-term video this year compared to other formats, according to a survey conducted by HubSpot.

As marketers continue experimenting with the format, they’re getting a sense of what works, what doesn’t, and how they can create the most impact.

“Don’t be afraid to test and learn,” Candice Beck, director of social, influencer, and Web3 at Chipotle, told us. “We have videos that totally outperform our benchmarks, and then we have videos that might not perform as well, and we learned from them…Being comfortable with that, and knowing that not every video is gonna go viral, is important.”

Read the full story here.—JS

With less than a week to go until the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, brands and streaming services are sharing more details on their plans for the highly anticipated event.

If you’ve been too busy vacationing working to keep up, here’s what you missed.

Coverage: Fox Sports, which has US broadcasting rights for the event, was 90% sold out of its ad inventory a month ago. NBCUniversal’s Telemundo division will be airing Spanish-language coverage on its Telemundo and Universo channels, as well as streaming on Peacock.

• Peter Lazarus, NBC Sports’s EVP of advertising sales and partnerships, said during a press briefing that the network is “virtually sold out” of ad inventory.
• Ford is the presenting sponsor for the pregame show, Volkswagen is the presenting sponsor for the halftime show, and Xfinity is presenting the Zona Mixta sports news show, according to Lazarus.
• “There’s no doubt in the momentum around women’s sports and the desire for brands to be part of the major women’s sporting events,” Lazarus said.

Meanwhile, Roku is making the tournament available on its devices via the “Women’s Sports Zone,” which rolled out in May. Apartments.com is serving as its first official sponsor. On the social front, FIFA has struck a content partnership with TikTok for the event.

Continue reading here.—AM

Each week, Marketing Brew recaps what people are talking about on social media, the trends that took over our feeds, and how marketers are responding.

Never thought we’d have a lash kiss: We gotta hand it to Maybelline; they had us for a minute. The makeup brand posted a video of the London Tube and a bus with eyelashes that were swiped by giant mascara wands placed in the city. Reactions online ranged from “Is this real?” to “This is the best ad I’ve ever seen.” Turns out, as Maybelline Senior Product Brand Manager Lauren Chapman explained on TikTok, it’s actually a CGI animation created by @origiful. No giant lashes were actually swiped in the making of this video.

Shake it up: Guillaume Huin, social media director at McDonald’s, posted on LinkedIn and Twitter to share how the chain chose to respond to the Grimace Shake trend, which he said helped generate billions in reach and millions in engagement and mentions. (ICYMI, the trend involved TikTok users faking elaborate deaths after drinking the Grimace Shake.)

Our biggest takeaway? Huin said it was important to let the fans drive the trend “the same way you would respectfully and gently nod at someone, without repeating what they said to show you agree with them and stealing their thunder.”

Thread it up: If you’re not sure what Threads even is, we covered it here. For the brands that do (and there seem to be many of them), the content opportunities appear to transcend the new platform. Brands like Joe & the Juice are making TikToks of their Threads. How meta of them.—KH

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Fun and games: TikTok released its first-ever report on gaming trends.

Business and pleasure: This guide explains what a LinkedIn creator is and how to become one.

Black and white: The ins and outs of using color psychology in marketing.

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Stories we’re jealous of.

• Vox looked into why your phone is full of texts from brands.
• The New York Times dug into why fake TV commercials created by generative AI feel unsettling yet familiar.
• The New Yorker examined “the rebranding of MDMA.”