Primal Kitchen has a mission to change the way the world eats and inspire better-for-you eating without compromising on flavor. For the summer grilling season, Primal Kitchen and Captiv8, a TikTok Creator Marketplace API partner, set out to inspire food-lovers with mouth-watering recipes using Primal Kitchen marinades, condiments, sauces and more. For both its engaging platform and the talent on it, TikTok was the perfect home to find hungry, health-conscious creators and audiences that would best serve content that captured the sounds and sights of summer grilling that was so engaging viewers would be able to almost taste Primal Kitchen’s products. To really make the video’s resonate, Primal Kitchen and Captiv8 set out to make TikToks, not ads, and partnered with foodie influencers (200K - 800K followers) to create recipe content that leveraged native trends found that were already performing well on TikTok -- plant-based food hacks, convenient weeknight dinner inspo, and of course, ASMR. From the crackle of fresh lettuce to the sizzling of meat on the grill, “the sounds of grilling” campaign leveraged native TikToker behavior of “sound on'' to inspire usage, drive conversation, and make Primal Kitchen memorable this summer.
The objective for the campaign was to drive awareness of Primal Kitchen condiments and was primarily measured through impressions/video views and engagement. To find the cast of TikTok Chefs, Primal Kitchen worked with Captiv8, who was one of the first influencer marketing companies to access TikTok’s first-party data through the TikTok Creator Marketplace API (TTCM). By leveraging TTCM’s API within Captiv8’s platform, Primal Kitchen filtered for over 100 different criteria, including text-based searches, to uncover creators who were organically speaking to niche topics such as: keto diet, plant-based diet, and convenience cooking. These data-backed searches allowed Primal kitchen to partner with the perfect talent, who were already organically creating content that aligned with Primal Kitchen’s own campaign goals. The combination of authentic partnerships with high performing TikTok trends created the foundation for driving #FlippingDelicious, ASMR based, content that encapsulated the idea of summer grilling while highlighting Primal Kitchen condiments. Ahead of this campaign, a big focus for Primal Kitchen during the summer grilling season was to expand their audience beyond niche diet-focused consumers to a broader audience. The #FlippingDelicious campaign broke out of their traditional demographic reaching “grillers” and showing off their bestselling suite of summer staples including Avocado Oil, Mayo made with Avocado Oil, Buffalo Sauce, BBQ Sauces and Ketchup. Given Primal Kitchen was a new brand, trying to break through to an established TikTok grilling audience and ensuring content came off as authentic and delicious as possible was of the utmost importance. In order to understand which creators were already breaking through to this audience in engaging ways, and how, Primal Kitchen leaned on Captiv8’s platform and its first-to-market TTCM API partnership.
Across 4 influencers and 8 TikTok videos, The #FlippingDelicious Summer Grilling campaign drove over 330,000 total impressions and saw a 8.37% engagement rate on TikTok - with all influencers’ campaign content outperforming their own channel’s engagement rate benchmarks. Creators such as Adam Al-nammari (@BigBoyCooks), who showed his keto audience how to make the perfect Smash burger just in time for Memorial Day with Primal Kitchen’s healthy condiments and tantalizing ASMR sounds, exceeded his typical engagement rate benchmarks by 3.7%. His content saw a 22.15% engagement rate, which is 12.7% higher than TikTok’s own engagement rate benchmark. The sentiment of the engagement was also overwhelmingly positive. The campaign resulted in a 74% positive sentiment which was 34% over the pre-established benchmarks. In the comments, brand loyalists declared their love for their favorite Primal Kitchen products while new users discovering the brand for the first time kept asking, “where can I buy it?”. To measure purchase intent, Captiv8 also ran a brand lift study which found that this campaign led to a +13% lift in purchase intent and a +12% lift in ad recall in audiences who were exposed to the campaign vs those who were not.
