Anyone who has lost hours of their life scrolling through TikTok probably knows that brand mascots have performed exceptionally well for marketers on the platform, from Duolingo to the Empire State Building. The TikTok algorithm seems to love it when characters, whether they’re influencers or mascots, get in front of the camera.
So in June, when TikTok rolled out Avatars (the platform’s answer to Bitmoji and contribution to the metaverse), many social media pros couldn’t help but compare these digitized versions of people to brand mascots.
Specifically, some marketers said avatars could function in a similar way mascots do on the platform, helping improve TikTok content performance for brands looking to diversify their creative strategy on the platform. But others think the characters have less to offer brands than IRL ones do, including working with influencers.
Doppelgängers
“This is a digital form of a mascot,” Katie McKiever, an independent social media consultant, told Marketing Brew. In her experience, she said, the content that does well on TikTok has to have one of two things: a person, or another type of character (like Duo or a Sour Patch Kids candy), representing the brand.
Avatars could provide another way for social media professionals to feed the TikTok content machine, according to McKiever. Being able to digitize a person could be one cheap way (avatars are free to create) to diversify a brand’s TikTok content—which could be especially helpful for one-person social media teams that don’t have a ton of creative manpower behind them like larger companies might.
“It gives another creative way for marketers—whether they’re internal to the brand or external creators—to make content for brands,” McKiever told us, explaining that coming up with consistent and unique content that TikTok likes can be difficult for small teams.
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Even one of the marketing pros behind Duolingo—the language learning app that made Duo the owl, perhaps the most well-known TikTok mascot, famous—agreed that these avatars aren’t not mascots.
“This could be a fun way for brands who don’t have a mascot or rep to add some individual personality to their accounts,” Kat Chan, Duolingo’s global director of social and influencers, explained.
Not a perfect metaphor
While avatars could work to marketers’ advantage like mascots have on TikTok, the benefits might not be identical. At least according to Heather Taylor, senior editor at PopIcon, a website Advertising Week runs that’s all about brand mascots.
The mascots that have become TikTok famous, Taylor explained, exist in the physical universe in addition to the metaverse. Think of the actual person in the Duo mascot suit, or the tangible pieces of Sour Patch Kids candy, for instance.
Perhaps the fact that influencers and mascots on the platform exist in real life could have something to do with why they generate engagement and virality on the platform.
“I’m not entirely sure how many mascots on TikTok are fully digital. But I feel like the ones that work the best are the ones that are getting physical out in the real world,” Taylor told us. “There’s just an element of them that feels real, you know?”
Taylor cited a recent trend—buying digital clothing for metaverse avatars—as one example of how these avatars might be too “perfect” or beautiful to work in the TikTok formula. “Brand mascots aren’t necessarily known for their apparel,” she joked.