5 minutes with… Jack Carter, head of UK automotive brand partnerships at TikTok

While selling a car may seem like an obscure use case for TikTok, Jack Carter, who heads TikTok’s UK automotive brand partnerships, explains how the platform can help promote and sell cars. 

TikTok is a huge entertainment platform with its short form video format. It’s also known for its huge youth fanbase. So how can car retailers use TikTok to interest a mature car buying audience?

We've seen a real ageing up of our audience on TikTok, the reason being rooted in the fact that your experience is unique to you. Your TikTok For You page - which is in effect your homepage - is tailored to the things you like to watch.

So that diversity of content is leading to real diversity in terms of demographic.

So specifically, what can dealers gain by using TikTok? Are we talking about brand building or establishing a corporate identity to promote trust, build confidence?

We have worked with a range of OEMs and we can offer full funnel ad solutions, from driving brand awareness to loyalty to running lead gen campaigns to test drive the actual car.

Peugeot for example recently ran a campaign over three months at the start of the year, promoting a range of their models.

Not only that did that touch brand awareness and making sure people know exactly what Peugeot stands for from a brand perspective, but the campaign also pushed users down the funnel and encouraged them to actually try out Peugeot for themselves by test driving one of their models. 

What was really encouraging to see was an increase of 76% in intent to consider purchasing Peugeot with a 31% increase in favourability.

Those kind of metrics are more mid and lower funnel and are traditionally very hard to shift because of the long purchasing cycle of a car, but it's a testament to the fact that Peugeot leant into the platform and utilised it for a variety of objectives whether that was increasing relevancy, or whether that was converting users to actually get behind the wheel of the car.

What about this tool in the hands of car retailers themselves? They're going to do different things with it, aren't they?

One of the communities in which people have an interest is tips and tricks or ‘did you know you car can do this?’. It’s really informative and we've seen a lot of dealerships lean into that element and doing it in an entertaining way.

For example, Arnold Clark has embraced the humorous side of TikTok with their playful but engaging content to showcase their latest models and expert insights on the car market. Dealerships have a real opportunity to engage with users and drive action.

The experience on TikTok is quite intimate, because it's ‘full screen, sound on’ and so a retailer can create a sort of relationship with the user. It feels inherently more intimate and so it's a way of dealerships and OEMs breaking down their more corporate side and giving users a glimpse ‘beneath the bonnet’ so to speak.

And this relationship with the user is helpful in casting a light on parts of the automotive world that people have questions about; whether that is to do with a particular model or the benefits of switching to EV.

An example I'll give you is Citroen ran a campaign that delivered product messages about their eC4X  in quite an engaging, humorous way as if they were talking to the car in an interview setup. What it was addressing so effectively were fair and genuine questions - but doing it in an entertaining way.

I can understand that manufacturers live in that particular creative space and have the time and resource to do it well, but I wonder whether TikTok would be as useful to a dealership with a small network?

I think it's the idea that TikTok is basically democratising content because it allows everyone to be a content creator. It’s ultimately a powerful platform for entertainment, whereby anyone can be involved regardless of size, from global automotive groups to local dealerships.

I see TikTok as a platform for creative expression for not just entertaining content, but content that is going be providing useful information to your customers.

I've seen a huge uptake both from a volume perspective in terms of OEMs, and dealerships but also on the more luxury end of the scale. Lamborghini and Mercedes were two of the first automotive brands to create a profile two or three years ago.

More recently, we've seen the likes of Bentley Motors, Range Rover and Defender join TikTok, demonstrating the kind of extensive reach of the platform and the fact that there's a real fit for a wide range of brands.

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OK, so what’s the smart way to make TikTok a success?

That's a fair question. Often, when I talk to my clients, I tell them they need to turn up on TikTok in the right way. And when I say the right way it means in the native way - creating content that is fit for the platform. TikTok is an immersive, full-screen, and sound-on platform, and successful content needs to lean into this.

So when you're scrolling through and you see a piece of content from a dealership or an OEM, it doesn't feel out of place. If you were to simply put a TV ad onto TikTok, people would just keep scrolling so a quick way of making it native is by working with creators who will use their expertise and understanding to generate content for you as a brand, be that a dealership or an OEM.

For example, Vauxhall were recently inspired by the Wes Anderson trend that took off on TikTok a few months ago. They worked with a creator to bring their Astra Electric to life with a campaign that played off famous film tropes and tapped into the stylised aesthetic of sci-fi, thriller and spy genres.

So we would recommend the use of influencers or what we call TikTok ‘creators’. We see them very much as creative directors because they understand the platform really well and understand how to talk to the TikTok user community.

Are these creators TikTok employees?

A creator can be anyone who creates TikTok content. TikTok Creator Marketplace is home to an expansive list of creators, including valuable data that can help brands make informed decisions about collaborations, before bringing creators directly.

Peugeot once worked with an auto-creative called She Talks Cars (@shetalkscars) who talks about cars in a genuine and authentic way that connects with her audience.

She Talks Cars created a variety of content, some stuff was focusing on car reviews, other elements involved her looking back at the heritage of Peugeot and spoke about the journey the brand had been on.

It's a quick way, a great way and an easy way of creating content for the dealership or OEM with a third party who really understands TikTok.

Is it still a 30-sec format?

You can create TikTok videos up to 10 minutes in length although when we're talking to brands about running paid campaigns what we recommend is between 20-30 seconds as that gives you the optimum time to tell an engaging story without losing the interest of the audience.

The key point about TikTok is that entertainment is king so if you're not entertaining the user, they're going to scroll on past, irrespective of message and length so will not click on or engage with your content. You need to ask yourself, how can you be entertaining with the content that you create?

Is it very important to have the ability to click through?

Absolutely. When brands run ads on TikTok, businesses can link through to their own site. The objective is often driving traffic to something like the model page or configurator. Fiat have done that with a recent 500e campaign which ran alongside a lead gen activation where users first watch the ad, and then click on a link to fill in a form with their details before being contacted by their local dealership.

Is there a cost as a commercial user?

If you're creating an ‘organic’ profile, absolutely not, but we do have the ability to run paid campaigns, which are working towards an objective whether that's purely brand awareness or whether that's a traffic driving or conversion objective.

In the first instance, we usually recommend brands take a test and learn approach - experimenting with tools and trends to find out what works best for their audience.

Often we see the most successful way is to have a blend an organic profile which consistently engages with the audience, and then have spikes of paid campaigns that might promote say, a certain vehicle or a promotion that they want to be pushing out.

Is there any specimen area of the website where people can see what the best TikTok practitioners are doing?

If you type in ‘CarTok’ - which as a hashtag has over 57 billion view and has grown 1,000% over the last year so you'll be there for a while - you can look up how other profiles are providing inspiration.

Alongside the other profiles I've already mentioned, Mclaren, MINI and Porsche are also successfully using the platform to reach and engage with potential new customers.

TikTok not only offers automotive brands the opportunity to engage with their customers of today, but also allows them to build a relationship with and secure the car buyers of the future.