By Charles Lee Mathews. With short-form video now deeply embedded in South African digital culture, TikTok has become impossible for brands to ignore. Yet success on the platform requires abandoning traditional marketing playbooks in favour of cultural fluency, algorithmic literacy, and a willingness to cede creative control to the creators who understand its rhythms best.
“TikTok has reshaped how culture travels, how it is consumed, how stories are told, and how influence is built,” says Chabi Setsubi, head of community management at VML. “A viral moment is no longer the finish line; for brands, it’s the starting point for driving real value. Turning views into value requires a new playbook that balances creative chaos with brand consistency, relevant trends with local nuance, and entertainment with effectiveness,” Setsubi says.
In early 2025, TikTok had 23.4 million users aged 18 or over. It’s now the country’s third most used platform, behind WhatsApp and Facebook. The user numbers may include inactive accounts, but usage data shows how deeply TikTok has embedded itself. Meltwater reports TikTok’s average usage at 26 hours and 39 minutes per month. This is significantly higher than YouTube (25 hours, 15 minutes), WhatsApp (23 hours, 42 minutes), Facebook (16 hours, 18 minutes) or Instagram (8 hours, 11 minutes).
These numbers tell only part of the story. With nearly half of South Africa’s internet users active on the platform, TikTok has evolved from a social media channel into a cultural operating system. One that requires brands to fundamentally rethink how they show up, what they say, and who they empower to say it. For CMOs accustomed to controlled messaging and polished production values, this presents both a challenge and an opportunity: the platform rewards authenticity over perfection, and cultural fluency over brand guidelines.
Creative freedom wins
“The most successful brand collaborations today are those that can strike a balance between creative freedom and brand voice. TikTok’s magic lies in its creative unpredictability, allowing creators the freedom to interpret the brief through their own lens, tone, and insights about their own community. The era of over-scripted influencer content is fading; audiences can detect inauthenticity and misalignment,” says Setsubi.
“Brands that can, operate with guardrails and not guidelines (values, tone, visual identity), but allow creators to lead with their personality and cultural insight. This shift recognises that creators aren’t just content producers; they are culture translators who understand the nuances of language, humour, and trends that make TikTok tick,” she notes.
“To successfully localise global TikTok formats, brands must deeply understand and respect South Africa’s diverse cultural landscape, linguistic nuances, and unique sense of humour. Think of translating global formats through a local lens and embracing the country’s inherent ‘remix culture’, a characteristic evident in local music genres like kwaito and amapiano, as well as township slang, long before TikTok,” says Niamh NicLiam, the managing partner with Ogilvy Social.Lab/C2.
On a practical level, NicLiam says that this is what that looks like:
- Embrace multilingualism: With 12 official languages, incorporating popular phrases, slang, and even code-switching (the mixing of languages) helps content land with the right audiences.
- Leverage local humour and references: Adapt global meme formats to reflect local scenarios, inside jokes, and relatable daily struggles or triumphs. This ensures content feels native and authentic to the South African context.
Feed the algorithm
Understanding culture is only half the job; understanding the algorithm is the other. TikTok works very differently from older social platforms.
Where Instagram rewards aesthetic cohesion and Facebook prioritises established networks, TikTok’s algorithm is more meritocratic, surfacing content partly based solely on engagement. For brands, this represents a democratisation of reach, but only for those willing to play by the platform’s rules.
“The TikTok algorithm is designed to keep users engaged by serving highly personalised content on their FYPs (For You Pages). It prioritises engagement signals such as watch time, replays, comments, shares, saves, and accounts followed, as well as content relevance based on user interests and regional trends. It rewards videos that hook quickly and hold attention, rather than those that appear perfectly produced,” NicLiam says.
“Authenticity almost always trumps polish on TikTok. Users, particularly those in Gen Z and younger millennials, value authenticity, relatability, and unscripted content. Over-produced, corporate, or overtly promotional content often feels out of place and is quickly scrolled past,” NicLiam explains.
Trust builds traction
TikTok is built for participation, not passive watching. Brands that show a human side, such as behind-the-scenes moments, creators responding to campaigns, interactive challenges, tend to gain stronger traction and trust. As NicLiam notes, relatable content almost always beats something over-produced.
“TikTok’s algorithm rewards relevance, whereas other platforms reward you for your follower count. It surfaces content based on signals like watch time, engagement rate, and completion far more than your brand’s ad spend. The lesson here is that authenticity always beats polish because it allows for a deeper emotional connection. A lot of the time, your content forms part of a greater conversation, so be clear about the problem you’re solving, your brand offering, and your point of view,” says Setsubi
“The tension between control and freedom is where the magic happens, the smartest brands co-create with the right influencer who speaks to the core audience that their brand is trying to tap into. Trust is the new creative currency with your creator partners. The more brands trust creators’ instincts, the more creators invest emotionally in the content. This co-ownership often translates to higher engagement and deeper audience resonance,” Setsubi advises.
Setsubi notes that marketers are becoming far more sophisticated in how they measure TikTok’s value, moving beyond likes and views toward metrics that reflect “attention quality.” This includes assessing watch time and completion rates to understand whether content is compelling enough to finish, analysing saves and shares to determine if it inspires participation, evaluating comment sentiment to see whether it sparks conversation or advocacy, and considering creator credibility and engagement efficiency to gauge how trusted and effective the messenger is.
Niamh NicLiam’s TikTok toolkit
Measurement
Brands need a holistic, full-funnel approach to measurement on TikTok, moving beyond simple vanity metrics to understand the full impact of their efforts. This involves integrating TikTok data with broader marketing analytics platforms (think Google Analytics, CRM, as well as sales data) to get a comprehensive view of the customer journey and attribute value effectively.
Specifically:
- Metrics like watch time, re-watches, view duration, and comments should measure attention.
- Virality can be quantified through shares, hashtag uses, duets & stitches, organic reach, and follower growth.
- Conversion metrics include click-through rates, lead generation, sales, app installs, and ultimately, brand lift studies to gauge purchase intent and commercial impact.
Moving beyond vanity metrics
As social media increasingly shifts towards entertainment, the ability to earn and keep attention has become paramount. South African marketers are becoming more sophisticated in their TikTok measurement, focusing on deeper, more impactful metrics beyond just views and likes. They are tracking:
- Engaged reach: Views with 75%+ completion rates.
- Brand mentions and sound adoption: To understand organic spread and cultural impact.
- Comment sentiment and creativity of responses: Providing qualitative insights into audience perception and engagement.
- Brand Lift studies: Proving increasingly decisive in measuring shifts in key brand metrics like awareness, recall, and favourability.
- Website traffic, onsite engagement, and conversion tracking: To measure the full consumer journey into real-world actions.
- Sentiment Analysis studies: Offering deeper insights into consumer perception and brand salience.
Tracking metrics to commercial impact
Connecting TikTok exposure to conversion and commercial results demands an integrated measurement setup. This usually includes:
- TikTok Pixel & Events API: These are essential for setting up standard and custom events to capture key user actions on a brand’s website or app after a user views a TikTok video, including site visits and purchases. The Events API provides server-side tracking for more accurate data, particularly in light of increasing browser privacy restrictions.
- UTM parameters for bringing TikTok traffic into GA4 and revealing how users behave once they land on a site.
- CRM integration: Increasingly, agencies link TikTok campaign data with CRM systems to track the full customer path — from initial engagement to purchase and long-term value.
Together, these tools help marketers build a comprehensive picture of TikTok’s contribution to their business objectives, from initial attention to tangible commercial results.
The measurement ecosystem around TikTok is expanding quickly, offering more robust attribution options.
- The TikTok Pixel & Conversion API (CAPI) are fundamental, offering server-side tracking for more accurate conversion data, which is critical given the increasing restrictions on browser privacy.
- TikTok is expanding its partnerships with established measurement firms, including Nielsen, Kantar, and Oracle Moat, to provide comprehensive brand lift studies and viewability verification.
- Companies such as AppsFlyer, Adjust, and Branch provide detailed attribution for app installs and in-app events originating from TikTok campaigns, crucial for mobile-first businesses.
- Locally, agencies are increasingly connecting data clean rooms and first-party CRM data directly with TikTok campaigns. This enables more precise, privacy-compliant attribution and a deeper understanding of TikTok’s impact on sales, brand recall, and preference throughout the entire marketing funnel.
Case study: #PEPfinds TikTok campaign
PEP has traditionally engaged its loyal customer base (moms with kids) through Facebook and Instagram. But together with Ogilvy, the brand spotted a growing, organic “creator economy” on TikTok, where younger users were already sharing their latest “finds” from PEP stores. The core business challenge was to formally capitalise on the user-generated content (UGC) trend on TikTok. This meant translating existing engagement into measurable business growth and connecting with a new generation of shoppers, expanding PEP’s reach beyond traditional social media channels.
PEP launched the #PEPFinds campaign on TikTok with a clear strategy:
- Amplify organic behaviour: PEP leveraged the existing trend of users sharing their PEP discoveries, formalising it under the #PEPFinds hashtag.
- Strategic influencer partnerships: They collaborated with a diverse range of paid ambassadors (nano, micro, macro-influencers) to educate the audience about #PEPFinds. These creators showcased key product themes (like back to school, fashion, home, kids) while maintaining their authentic voice, allowing PEP to own the narrative within a creator-led environment.
- Authentic content focus: Creators were encouraged to speak directly to camera and show how products worked in real life, a strong fit for TikTok’s preference for relatable, less polished content.
- Shoppable hashtag and integration: #PEPFinds became a shoppable hashtag, making it easy for customers to browse, share, and explore PEP discoveries.
The results
Commercial success:
- With a modest initial budget of just R70,000, the campaign generated 237 million views on the #PEPHomeFinds hashtag and 172 million #PEPFinds.
- Up to 4K+ organic pieces of content have been generated since the campaign was launched.
- PEP HOME outgrew the total home market by +8%.
- PEP HOME experienced a 10% growth in sales value.
- The average PEP HOME basket value increased by 9.5%.
- A youth stationery capsule, launched as part of the campaign, generated strong sales revenue in just four months.
Building brand equity:
- The campaign significantly increased PEP’s brand reputation by four percentage points.
- Positive sentiment and buzz around the brand increased by 1.1%.
- By embracing and amplifying organic UGC, PEP aligned with TikTok’s core values, positioning the brand as authentic and relatable.
- PEP successfully connected with a younger audience by tapping into their existing social behaviours and empowering them as brand advocates.
- The campaign fostered a vibrant community around the brand, transforming customers into active participants who shared their #PEPfinds
