1 min readCreativePaid Media
On TikTok, the creates are the distribution
Views are what happens to your video. Creates are what happens with your sound, and that is where a record travels.
Peso Pluma and Natanael Cano’s PRC drew 438k+ TikTok creates on the way to 700M+ Spotify streams and 300M+ YouTube views. bbno$’s it boy drew 132k+ creates and 41M+ streams. A create is someone making their own video to your sound. Each one is a piece of distribution you did not pay for, in front of an audience you could not have targeted.
[ 01 ]Design the sound for the create, not the view
The clip that gets used is rarely the chorus. It is the eight seconds with a turn in it: a line that can caption a reveal, a drop that can cut to a before and after, a lyric that reads as a joke out of context. We pick the section before the campaign starts and build everything around it.
[ 02 ]Seed it, then get out of the way
- Brief a small set of creators on the format, not the message; the format is what gets copied
- Buy reach behind the creator videos that are already being copied, not the official one
- Watch creates per day as the lead metric; views follow it with a lag
- When a format takes, stop seeding and spend on the sound page instead
The official video gets its views. The record gets its streams from the hundreds of thousands of videos that are not yours.