To promote DreamWorks Animation and Universal Pictures’ new film Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, the Puss in Boots TikTok campaign had two primary objectives:
Established character Puss in Boots’ presence on TikTok; he had no official account nor much influence or cultural currency on the platform.
Since the previous feature film came out more than a decade earlier, we needed to create awareness and affinity for the Puss in Boots character, introducing (and re-introducing) him to audiences.
The campaign's first phase leveraged the first Puss in Boots film, the Shrek franchise films and custom animation to create awareness and re-introduce the character to today’s audiences. The first film may have been eleven years old, but the new TikTok videos were anything but dated.
We updated the original assets, adding design elements and native features—like custom captioning and text-to-voice narration—so everything felt modern and tailored for TikTok.
We repurposed and re-contextualized scenes and moments to incorporate current trends, memes, and cultural references to resonate and connect with younger audiences.
We leaned into cat memes and subcultures, using the most adorable and cat-tastic moments from the film to create videos all cat owners would love.
We showcased the characters' daring, brash, and cool personality.
In the second phase, we transitioned to promoting the new film, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, using clips, trailers, and custom animation to showcase new storylines and characters audiences would soon fall in love with.
We continued to use an array of tactics, design elements, and native features so every post was custom tailored for TikTok.
We continued to tap into trends and memes, leveraged trending audio, and tailored post copy with younger audiences in mind, demonstrating the channel was locked into what was happening in the culture and on the platform in an authentic, relatable way.
Our efforts paid off as the campaign's success went far beyond awareness and affinity for the film and character. Puss in Boots became a social media superstar and was seemingly everywhere on TikTok. Video after video went viral, use of the film’s hashtags went viral, and the TikTok community created an untold number of videos—many of which also went viral—about the film and character.
After joining the platform in August 2022:
The channel grew to 1M followers in 5 months.
Growth of the channel is accelerating; it only took 5 weeks to gain an additional 700k followers.
The channel earned 234M video views in 6 months, an average of 3M views per video.
TikTok videos tagged #PussInBootsTheLastWish (4.3B) or #TheRealPussInBoots (11.4B) accumulated 15.7 billion views. For comparison, videos tagged #PussInBoots have 2.4 billion views.
