The joy of authenticity | TikTok for Business

Juni 2023

Creatives have always aimed to tell us something about who we are and the times we are living in. If TikTok is the moment, then its 1 billion global users must be in pursuit of short bursts of joy. It’s a welcome shift and goes beyond something that has defined social media for a while: “relatability”.

Years later, and among other developments, we’ve learnt that the world doesn’t have to be such an overwhelming place; and more importantly that difference is crucial for our survival as joy-seekers. As the world burns in more ways than one, it is radically life-affirming to move past relatable figures who mirror our lens on life and on towards authentic experience, no matter how different those experiences are from our own.

For some time what got attention was a cast of predominantly white replicas of one another who were responding to a generation looking for older brothers and sisters to help them feel connected to an overwhelming digital world. Many of these had bodies, ideas and even postcodes like their audiences. In marketing agency rooms across the country, “relatability” was held up as if it was a golden ticket, and scrawled on Post-Its and stuck on walls as we watched these “relatable” teens give a generation what we all thought we wanted – people just like us.