Issue #122 - Maxwell the Cat on TikTok
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Issue #122 - Maxwell the Cat on TikTok
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Welcome to Good TikTok Creative!
We are Simon Andrews and Anthony McGuire, two people who have been working in marketing, advertising, and media for decades.
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TikTok Case Study = Maxwell the Cat
Simon’s Take:
We are really talking about Clancy’s - an auto body shop in Florida. Their social has blown up with a concept that lots are copying. The idea? Conflating two ideas and creating something compelling for the Social Media Manager cohort (#SMM has 925m views).
I lied on my resume is a strong TikTok trend - #liedonmyresume has 5m views - and Maxwell the Cat has been around for a few years, but never gone big. Until now.
The Clancy team posted a TikTok saying “Guys I lied on my resume and got a job doing the social media of this body shop, please blow this up so I don’t get fired.”
And a photo of the auto shop was decorated with Maxwell the Cat.
It’s a neat idea and clearly resonated with SMMs - we see Maxwell in TikToks from brands like Emirates, Currys, National Trust, EA Sports as well as loads of football clubs; PSG, Barcelona, Everton and Gillingham.
Many have evolved the idea replacing Maxwell with the boat meme - now at 50m views.
Great illustration of the risks of going viral - the idea gets big but the brand can be forgotten.
Clancy thought about this and designed their activity as a campaign - using the title The Maxwell Saga they launched new TikToks every few days - each labelled as a numbered Episode. They use these episodes in a Playlist and help dodge the randomness of the algorithm; when you see Episode 7 it’s human nature to go looking for the previous episodes.
These TikToks introduce other members of the Clancy team - particularly Bossman - and chronicle the teams reaction to the campaign success. It’s all great fun and I am sure they are super busy.
Learnings? Finding ways to activate other Social Media Managers is still a winning strategy. And finding fresh ways to use existing memes and assets can really pay off.
Anthony’s Take:
To understand what social media (and marketing more broadly) means today, you’ve got to have a more open-minded, diversified approach to your creative vs. traditional advertising creative. Today’s internet has created (or revealed) elements of sub-culture that may have seemed odd just a few decades ago. The speed at which culture propagates across the world is the sociological equivalent of lightning.
And that brings us to memes. Maxwell the Cat (read the article entry from KnowYourMeme) is a meme that originates from a picture someone shared of their cat in 2017. People made an edit of that cat picture and started using it as a mod in video games. Towards the end of 2022, the cat meme was not only used in video games but started appearing across Twitter and other social media platforms.
AND THEN Clancey’s Auto Body, a small business in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, posted a video on their TikTok account on February 20th. The video was a bouncing image of Maxwell the Cat on top of the company’s headquarters, with the caption, “Guys I lied on my resume and got a job doing the social media of this body shop, please blow this up so I don’t get fired.” That has gotten around 25 Million views so far.
As Simon mentioned above, the social media manager behind this TikTok then created a subsequent series of videos highlighting the different people and services from the auto body shop, all through the lens of fun and memes.
It’s hard to know the specifics of what happened next, but after the February 20th video started going viral, we saw a variety of companies and brands ranging from Emirates to PSG to IKEA all posting videos of Maxwell the Cat.
Do the CMOs of Emirates/PSG/IKEA each think that posting the Maxwell the Cat meme will drive significant uplift in brand awareness or sales? Maybe. In the heads of the CMOs (or more likely, the social media managers), there’s an element of game theory that comes from posting the hot new meme.
If Emirates realizes that people are engaging with Maxwell the Cat, to the tune of tens of millions of views, it’s a fairly solid bet to think that posting an Emirates ‘remix’ of Maxwell the Cat should generate similar-ish levels of reach. And as we have seen from the dozens of brands we have examined on Good TikTok Creative, there can never really be a guarantee of reach. Instead of coming up with something completely brand new and creative that could fail, there is lower effort and lower downside with latching your brand onto something that is trending - like a Maxwell the Cat meme.
So as the social media manager, you may as well jump onto the trending meme of the day.
And that brings me back to the point of diversification. Posting a timely meme keeps your brand relevant and increases the likelihood of views if executed well. Being up to date with trends is something valuable not only on TikTok, but all modern forms of media. While organizations like Emirates/PSG/IKEA are generating views from the meme, we know that meme-related content cannot form the entirety of their strategy.
Your media strategy should have a diverse mixture of tactics. Memes should be part of this, and Maxwell the Cat is a great example of how this can work.
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