In just over a year since first venturing into TikTok marketing, prebiotic soda brand Olipop has quickly reached virality on the platform, to the point that its TikTok presence has become deeply interwoven with Olipop’s brand identity.
“The amount of people that now refer to us as ‘the TikTok soda’ is insane,” Steven Vigilante, Olipop’s head of new business development, told Ad Age. “We were in a Walmart shooting a commercial with Camila Cabello, and a family came up because we had a pallet of Olipop. They didn’t even notice Camila—they were just like, ‘It’s the TikTok soda!’”
Olipop launched in 2017, designed to offer a healthier alternative to traditional sugary sodas by swapping excessive sugar for fiber and prebiotics, but still serving classic soda flavors like root beer and cola. Today, the brand sells its sodas via its website, as well as through wholesale partnerships with a range of grocery retailers—including Target, Whole Foods, Kroger and Walmart—but Olipop’s business initially centered solely around its brick-and-mortar stores, located exclusively in California, Vigilante said.
The COVID pandemic forced the soda brand to shift gears from those California stores and instead invest in e-commerce, he said. And with that change came the need to rework Olipop’s marketing strategy, leading the brand to turn from in-store events and promotions to social media, influencer partnerships, and ultimately, TikTok—which is currently the only platform in Olipop’s social media budget, he said.
“We’ve turned off all of our ad spend across every other social platform, so we’re just running ads on TikTok, forming creator partnerships, and making content for our organic page,” Vigilante said. “[TikTok] is literally our entire strategy right now. And the last few months have been our best ever as a business after shutting off all of those other platforms.”
Embracing TikTok and creators
Following the outbreak of the pandemic, and Olipop’s subsequent refocusing on e-commerce, Vigilante quickly realized the brand “needed to figure out how digital marketing and influencer marketing work.” In the first few months of 2020, he noticed several direct-to-consumer brands in the healthy food niche—such as Magic Spoon and Athletic Greens—sponsoring wellness influencers on Instagram, and he reached out to a friend at Magic Spoon to ask how Olipop could do the same.
“That call honestly changed the trajectory of our business, because we had never paid a content creator for the first few years of the business,” Vigilante said. “[My friend] was like, ‘You’re an idiot. We pay everybody, and it works really well for us.’”
Olipop took its first steps into influencer marketing in the summer of 2020, focusing on “traditional” creator partnerships on Instagram that involved the brand providing influencers with fairly scripted information about Olipop to share with their followers alongside discount codes, he said. These partnerships, designed largely to drive consumers to Olipop’s website, were “very transactional and sales-focused,” he added, and their effectiveness began to wane in mid-2021, after Apple’s App Tracking Transparency framework limited Instagram’s ability to collect and track consumer data.
Vigilante moved Olipop to TikTok in September 2021, despite being wholly unfamiliar with the platform himself. Initially, the brand worked with an external agency to commission video content, but “that was kind of a disaster,” he said, with Olipop only gaining about 1,000 followers between September and January 2022. Rather than seeking a new external partner, Vigilante chose to look for a TikTok creator to produce videos for the brand.
“I had never made content; I will never make content,” he said. “When brands are outsourcing their content to external partners, it doesn’t come off as authentic. External partners can never know the goings-on behind-the-scenes of a business … So, I was on the hunt for a creator to kind of be the face of our page.”
He stumbled across Sara Crane, one of Olipop’s current TikTok content strategists, purely by chance, after Crane posted a video talking about how one of her friends was mocking her desire to become an influencer. From Olipop’s TikTok account, Vigilante commented, “should we give you a brand deal to shut the friend up,” to which Crane replied, “why yes i think that would be quite effective.”
The partnership was originally intended to be temporary, but after briefly working with Crane, Vigilante was impressed by her plethora of ideas for TikTok content—and he offered her a position as an in-house content creator for Olipop in February 2022. The success of Olipop’s TikTok content soon took off, with the brand gaining nearly 90,000 followers in the past year and accumulating over half a million likes across its videos.
The power of in-house creators and TikTok partners
For Olipop, the name of the TikTok game has been consistently posting videos twice per day, as well as only using the platform to share entertaining content tied to the brand, not sales pushes or promotional codes, Vigilante said.
“We’ve never tried to get people to buy anything—I think that’s really important,” he said. “People come to TikTok to be educated and entertained. And if you think about it, if some random person comes across your video and has no idea who you are, you have to give them a reason to stay, not throw promo codes in their faces.”
He has largely given Crane—along with Diana Rondi, another in-house content creator for Olipop—creative control over the brand’s TikTok content. Crane and Rondi film and edit all of Olipop’s videos on their phones, often creating simple takes on trending audio or cultural moments like waiting in line for Taylor Swift concert tickets. TikTok users prefer this type of raw content that resembles native videos made by the typical TikTok user, Crane said—polished, highly-produced videos have historically failed for Olipop.
Following in the footsteps of other popular TikTok brands like Duolingo featuring a brand mascot in their content, Olipop also invested in several can costumes labeled with each of Olipop’s flavors. Crane and Rondi have used these extensively in humorous videos, such as one in which they wore the costumes to the company’s holiday party.
Crane and Rondi appearing regularly in Olipop’s TikTok content has allowed followers to better connect with the brand, Crane said. She and Rondi are essentially “channel hosts” and “brand personalities” for Olipop, Crane added, and they serve as a proxy for the brand that consumers can build trust and familiarity with—which, in turn, boosts their trust in Olipop.
“I’ve seen a lot of brands just bringing in a bunch of random videos they have from a million different creators or influencers,” Crane said. “That’s really rich content, but it’s really designed for that creator’s [specific] audience. We keep that on the creator’s page, where it’ll resonate with their audiences, and then we separately post our organic content to the Olipop page.”
After sharing video ideas in a group chat made up of Olipop’s social media team, Crane and Rondi can generally upload content without having to navigate a lengthy approval process. This rapid timeline has enabled Olipop to quickly jump onto platform trends and viral moments, such as when TikTok user Amanda Jones posted a recipe for a healthier substitute for Diet Coke: balsamic vinegar and La Croix.
TikTok users were puzzled, and many disgusted, by the concept of drinking balsamic vinegar in an attempt to get around the high amount of sugar in Diet Coke. One user commented, “Girl just drink olipop vintage cola…[what the heck] is this,” and Olipop quickly leveraged the situation to ship a box of their “Vintage Cola” flavored soda to Jones fewer than 24 hours after she posted her video.
Jones later shared a video of herself opening the gift and sampling the Olipop drink, which received an additional 500,000 views and hundreds of comments ranging from users expressing their love for the brand to others saying they were interested in trying it themselves. The exposure Olipop gained from that stunt also netted the brand’s account over 5,000 new followers, Vigilante said.
Additionally, Olipop has honed in on building a creator partnership network on TikTok over the past several months, Vigilante said. The brand’s hashtag for these influencer partnerships, #OlipopPartner, currently has over 560 million views—and the hashtag garnered 100 million of those views in the last two months alone. This reach far exceeds what Olipop typically received on Instagram, with an average six-month campaign on that platform amassing only about 50 million views for the brand, Vigilante said
Each month, Olipop works with an average of 30 to 40 different creators, and the brand partnered with roughly 100 total TikTok influencers in the second half of 2022, he said. Rather than tapping influencers for an “Olipop-dedicated video,” in which these creators would hawk Olipop’s sodas, the brand instead asks them to simply feature one of the cans in their normal content—for example, an influencer whose content involves them eating fast food exchanging a soda from a given restaurant for a can of Olipop, he said.
“We started doing this strategy where we kind of moved away from the transactional creator partnerships into much more of what I would consider product placements,” Vigilante explained. “I’d rather show up in three or four pieces of [a creator’s] normal content over a couple of weeks or a month … that does really well, versus an Olipop-dedicated video that’s not their normal content and doesn’t perform as well.”
Chanen Johnson, a TikTok influencer and wife of NFL player Juwan Johnson, has regularly partnered with Olipop on these product placement videos over the past several months. For this content, she attempts to meld the can of Olipop seamlessly into her typical videos, such as taking a sip from the can during a “storytime” video of how she met her husband.
“It’s really difficult to do a brand deal when somebody really wants you to be scripted,” Johnson said. “I don’t want to put a brand deal out there and know it’s going to do bad. With these videos, I can literally just put a product in my—very organic to my audience and to my niche—video, and it’s going to perform well, which benefits both of us.”
Extending creator partnerships beyond social media
In February 2022, Olipop received a $200 million valuation and announced it had amassed extensive funding from both business investors and celebrities, including Camila Cabello, Mindy Kaling and the Jonas Brothers. And with these investments, the brand has expanded its wholesale partnerships, selling its sodas in over 20,000 stores across the United States as of October.
This year, Olipop aims to continue to leverage those investments and extend its advertising into more traditional areas, such as TV and out-of-home, Vigilante said. The brand has already begun filming TV spots, including the Walmart commercial starring Cabello. But Vigilante also hopes to incorporate the creator partnerships that have contributed to the brand’s TikTok success to these new advertising mediums, he said.
By transitioning these existing partnerships with influencers like Johnson to new ad formats, “you’re just leveling up the partnership and expanding it onto other platforms with a face that’s pretty recognizable,” he said.
“I think if you can marry the right kind of digital content creator partnerships with TV, it can work really well,” he added.
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