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OTTO is Germany’s biggest e-commerce platform, yet they are still best known for their catalogues from the 90s — in other words: They are irrelevant for Gen Z. The brief was to give the brand’s image an update for 2023 and generate cultural credibility with the help of their partner brand adidas Originals on the social media platform TikTok.

Our approach: stop thinking like advertisers and start thinking with creators. So, we gathered Germany’s five most successful influencers with a total of 6 million followers and brought them together on a huge TikTok playground curated with Gen Z relevant products: seven sets in a warehouse full of fashion items by our partner brand adidas Originals and tons of gaming, interior design and beauty gadgets from OTTO.‍

The idea was to co-create a campaign together with influential creators that have the right attitude and creativity. But instead of constraining them with a boring script, we just let them do what they do best: come up with ideas to create authentic and relatable content for Gen Z.

The campaign’s objective was to increase consideration and turnover for OTTO and generate new customers among this young target group. The total budget including agency fees, marketing, influencer fees, licensing and production was €150,000. Working with 5 influencer artists for only one day on set, we co-created a campaign that produced much more than just the 19 assets selected for the campaign.

Research from different channels, such as GWI and statista, shows that influencer cooperation and the use of music are highly relevant to raising cultural credibility on fast-moving platforms. Gen Z has an attitude-driven lifestyle which affects their choice of brands — if you want to stay relevant for them, you must follow the latest trends. The most-used social media platform right now is TikTok, where over 46% of the users buy their favourite influencers’ own products. That’s exactly why we partnered up with five of Germany’s most popular TikTok influencers to create authentic content.

None of the creators were given a script or strict directions, meaning that they were able to unleash their full creative potential and produce native content that would resonate directly with their audiences.

The cultural background gap between OTTO and adidas Originals was closed by finding the right synergies: OTTO’s huge variety of products and adidas Original’s street credibility. We wanted to “inspire together”.

We knew that we would need the right mix of Germany’s most successful content creators on TikTok to reach the right community. They are @ninachuba, @jeyisbaee, @zsazsainci, @helgemark and @henry.ng, with a combined total of over 6 million followers. Together, we created roughly two dozen native and authentic TikTok’s for OTTO’s own account. Examples can be found here, here and here.

But our creators posted the footage on their own accounts, too, and added a huge awareness boost to a campaign that collected a couple of thousand comments which were answered by OTTO’s community management in partnership with our creators.

For Gen Z, creativity is the currency of their individual lifestyle — it’s rapid, unpolished, and instinctive. So, it just didn’t feel natural to approach them with a constricting script — we knew the rules for being successful on TikTok would be different. That’s why we set the stage for our five content creators to show us their own vision of the campaign in native and truly authentic TikTok footage. ‍

We put our trust in their creativity and focused all of ours on the perfect selection of content creators and building our seven playground sets. On set, we accompanied our influencers as co-creative sparring partners and pushed the creative flow to let everyone express themselves freely. Each of the seven different sets had its own unique theme and feel. They were dedicated to sports, music, fashion, skating, graffiti, and we even had a lounge area to chill out and game. We avoided expensive post-production and edited the footage right on set. With not much more than a camera and a few smartphones, we achieved a unique look and feel that created spontaneous and authentic fun for our Gen Z target group on TikTok. To top it off, we bridged the gap between Gen Z creativity and the brands of OTTO and adidas Originals with a claim that defined the whole idea behind the campaign: together is nicer.

And that’s how we strengthened OTTO’s brand values within Gen Z.

Our campaign left quite an impression all around with five extremely amazed creators, an absolutely fascinated community, and some very impressive numbers on TikTok.

Over 90 million impressions, over 6 million users reached, over 300,000 likes, and about an 80% increase in followers for OTTO — all generated by 19 assets created in 1 day on set. But most importantly: finally having contemporary and authentic content that put a brand like OTTO, widely perceived as old-fashioned, on the map for young people. Together with a partner brand in adidas Originals that stands for street cred like no other, we updated OTTO’s social media communication to the latest version and had a big impact among the Gen Z target group.

The cherry on top came when TikTok Business published our success story as a flagship campaign on the fastest moving social media platform right now.

Our OTTO x adidas campaign was not only widely successful amongst TikTok users within Gen Z, it also showed a contemporary way for big brands to approach content on emerging social media platforms.

OTTO pushed themselves forward with a contemporary take on brand relevance by bringing together the hottest creators with the iconic adidas Originals brand.

The curated space enabled us to place the right products in the hands of the right influencers in a fully organic way - as they were creatively free to interact with the clothing and other items in ways that felt authentic to them and their audiences.