Tiktok strikes gold with Team GB: 25 per cent revenue surge in UK during Olympics
Tiktok’s revenue has soared since the start of the Olympics thanks to an increase in advertising spend after it launched a campaign to debut GB athletes on the platform and as audience interest in the Games has piqued.
The video sharing app, which is an official partner of Team GB and Paralympic GB, has revealed that revenue soared by 25 per cent in the week that followed the opening ceremony. It expects this figure to stay consistent, if not increase, throughout the remainder of the Paris 2024 Olympics.
Viral videos posted on Tiktok by those staying in the so-called Olympic Village have fuelled a surge of interest in the Olympic Games and led to increased advertiser interest. Major brands including Aldi, Cocacola, Visa and Natwest have all produced Olympic-related adverts on the platform.
Kris Boger, general manager of global business solutions UK&I at Tiktok, said the company was “blown away” by the response to the campaign, which launched in July.
“Tokyo was massive for us,” he explained, “and, particularly because there weren’t spectators, we became a bit of a channel where people discovered what was happening behind the scenes at the Olympics, or the athlete experience at the Olympics on Tiktok,” he said.
“So we knew that there was always going to be that activity. But we’ve been blown away, really. We’ve seen a 1200 per cent increase in the number of creators from the opening ceremony lone, which is just huge.”
In recent weeks, tiktokers have flocked to trending videos of athletes such as British diver Tom Daley, US gymnast Simone Biles and Norwegian swimmer Henrik Christiansen – also known as the Olympic muffin man, to keep up to date with both the sporting and background action.
With around 1.3m posts about the Olympics on Tiktok, Boger said it is a “natural place” for brands to be looking to communicate with their audience.
“We’ve really gone out of our way to make it an attractive place to run a marketing campaign during the Olympics,” he added, citing Tiktok’s work with Samsung’s ‘open always wins’ campaign.
It comes as Tiktok is increasingly focusing on sport. While it is yet to decide plans for the next Olympics, it is investing heavily in major sporting and entertainment moments.
Much of this will be channelled through its Tiktok Pulse Premiere solution, which brings professional premium content from the likes of Sky Sports, BBC studios, ITV and Channel Four onto the platform.
“It’s been a really big focus for us,” said Boger, “so we’ll continue to look to bring that content on board. We’ll continue to work with creators and athletes to make sure that Tiktok is a place where they want to be.”
“We’re in early stage testing as well. We only really launched it in the past year, but the ambition is definitely to be to have premium sports content on Tiktok,” he added.