The TikTok Games
At Paris 2024, it’s not just the medal-winning athletes that are capturing the attention of fans; it’s those that are showing their personality on social media. Our Client Services Director James Gwinnett looks at what businesses can learn from the rise of TikTok at the Olympic Games.
Pierre du Coubertin founded the Olympic Games based on three values; excellence, respect and friendship. Based on events in Paris, maybe we should rewrite them to include personality. And a knack for coming up with a snappy reel.
For some of the participants, albeit every single one deserves credit for being among the most talented and athletic humans on the planet, you could argue that a bit of character is capturing the attention of fans more than their sporting achievements.
Yes, French swimmer Leon Marchand bagged himself four gold medals, Simone Biles valiantly returned to the gymnastics arena after suffering the dreaded ‘twisties’ in Tokyo, and Novak Djokovic completed tennis. There were even the heroic exploits of Paris 2024 poster boy Antoine Dupont. He was instrumental in the host nation’s gold medal in the showpiece rugby sevens event.
But there have also been the people’s heroes; Turkish shooter Yusuf Dikec, Norwegian swimmer Henrik Christiansen, and Ilona Maher, the ‘other’ star of the rugby sevens. All thanks to social media.
Changing habits
At the European Championships in Germany, earlier this summer, young audiences shunned live television in favour of TikTok. While 24.2 million fans watched the final across the BBC and ITV, making it easily the most watched TV programme of the year, this figures pales in compared to the 32.3 million who watched England’s victory over West Germany in 1966.1 You know, when football actually came home.
Ofcom has found that the trend is continuing into the Olympic Games. Those aged 16-24 prefer to ‘spend three times as long each day (1 hour 33 minutes) watching video-sharing platforms such as TikTok and YouTube’2 as they do live television.
Bearing in mind TikTok has only been around at one previous Games, and users have doubled since that slightly drab (on account of COVID) affair in Tokyo, the platform’s rise has been nothing less than meteoric. Indeed, in 2022, after Tokyo, TikTok was the most downloaded app in the world.
Why the fuss?
TikTok’s transition from digital dance floor to the global behemoth it now is has paved the way for young fans, of the Olympics especially, to see a side of the Games that the broadcasters simply can’t offer. It’s the behind the scenes-style content from the athletes themselves that these fans are craving, from what they’re eating, to the bus rides to and from the sporting venues. Oh, and Tom Daley’s delightful knitting antics, of course.
So, while the surfers have ridden tubes in Tahiti, it has been the likes of Christiansen et al who have been making waves in Paris. Dubbed ‘The Muffin Man’, the Norwegian didn’t win any medals in the pool, but has grown his TikTok following from around 3,000 before the Games to more than 400,000, based on his love of the chocolate muffins in the Olympic Village. Similarly, despite the immense gulf in funding between men’s and women’s rugby, it’s not the Olympic gold medallist, Six Nations Grand Slam-winning, French league-winning, European Rugby Championship title-winning, World Sevens title-winning, World Rugby player of the year Dupont who’s the most followed rugby player on the planet; it’s Ilona Maher. The American has 2.2 million followers on TikTok thanks to her straight-talking, unapologetic approach to body positivity and promotion of the women’s game.
A more unlikely star of the greatest show on earth has been Dikec. While most pistol shooters come armed with an array of futuristic tech that is the envy of crack special forces units, 51-year-old Dikec became a social media sensation for his nonchalance at the Chateauroux Shooting Centre. The reactions to his winning silver – whilst wearing normal glasses and shooting with his other hand in his pocket – were, well, golden. Cue the memes and comparisons to John Wick. And even gold medal-winning athletes emulating him.
Quite where the Marmite character of Noah Lyles fits on the personality v athletic achievement spectrum is up for debate. Love him or loathe him for his over the top behaviour that some call charismatic and others call objectionable, the fastest man on the planet is an inspiration for millions of budding young athletes. He posted the following motivational message following his win, as an example of how it’s possible to overcome adversity:
If he’s not your cup of tea, I guess haters gonna hate!
What can we learn?
In the case of the Olympics, the athletes have undoubtedly ‘won the internet’. But the IOC has also done well to bring the Games to life for a young audience that it may not otherwise have won over. @Olympics on TikTok isn’t up there with the likes of WWE (28 million followers) or the NBA (22.2 m) in terms of its following, but it doesn’t boast the luxury of being a regularly-running event. Still, content such as ‘Meet & Greet’ interviews with athletes, ‘Back in Time’ comparisons with previous Games, and reels that showcase the medal winners, have brought Paris 2024 to life for 14 million new fans.
The sport industry is the fastest growing segment on TikTok but other industries can learn from the lessons of Paris and other sporting entities. Many brands remain hesitant to TikTok as a tool in their marketing strategy but its power to engage a young audience, whose behaviours are drastically different to only five years ago, cannot be ignored.
Take lawyer Kevin Kennedy. The real life Saul Goodman – in that he has a wacky collection of loud blazers, rather than he’s in cahoots with New Mexico’s leading drug lord – has amassed just shy of 2 million followers thanks to his #kevsgotyoucovered strapline and targeting of youngsters with content like whether teachers are legally allowed to keep you in class after the bell. While he is unquestionably another Marmite character, his ability to appeal to Gen Z followers is a demonstration of how to engage with a demographic that would otherwise be lost to competitors.
Maybe you don’t need to appeal to young customers. But maybe you do want young talent.
‘Something like almost 40% of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search … They go to TikTok or Instagram.’3 TikTok is creeping up the preferred list of search engines for everything from restaurants to jobs, based on video search results boasting a far higher click-through rate than more text-based content.
LinkedIn remains the go-to social media platform for job searches, but TikTok is hot on its heels for Gen Z.
Whatever your business objectives, can you really afford to ignore the netizens?
