Situation

As influential as TikTok has been in the west, American culture remain a mystery ByteDance leadership. With that, an important part of my role was to serve as a cultural translator to transform strategies from Beijing into language and concepts that would resonate with US audiences.

The brief articulated a need to communicate “on trend” and “cheap.” The earliest versions of the creative took this direction quite literally which was clearly not right. I stepped in to offer direction on how the project could meet their goals and connect to users authentically.

Task

TikTok was looking to create a campaign to connect to US back to school shoppers. It was important for TikTok to be able to come to market clearly showcasing its own voice and unique ability to help people discover new ideas and products.

The creative team was leveraging a design template they referred to as ‘the bento box.’ The recommendation was use a bright yellow color from the approved pallet, but leadership felt it was ‘too bright.’

I knew it was important to leaders to be able to ground the direction in some sort of tangible rationale. To me, yellow evoked the idea of a school bus. Using this insight, I was able to help leads see why this color was relevant to US shoppers and would help them associate the creative with the idea of ‘going to school and how the ‘bento box’ design complimented the ‘school bus’ concept.