Just as importantly, all these technical details are backed up by an underlying tone that’s equally native to the TikTok generation—it’s fast-paced, self-referential, self-deprecating and subtly absurd. Put it all together and you get a spot that feels natural and organic to the platform, not an awkwardly placed advertisement.
Creator integration
One of the biggest reasons for the ad’s success was its organic integration of beloved TikTok creators. But they weren’t just shoehorned into preexisting roles like Irate Customer or Employee #1. Hilton brought them into the process early on and gave them a ton of creative freedom so they could do what they do best, how they do it best. In addition to allowing Hilton to borrow the influencers’ creative genius, this ensured their existing followers would flock to the ad in droves to check out what basically counted as bonus content.
Creative pattern-breaking
As a platform, TikTok thrives on originality and breaking the mold. The idea of a 10-minute ad is already an enormous departure from the norm in and of itself, but the pattern-breaking doesn’t stop there.
If the spot had hung all of its hopes on nothing more than the concept of “an advertisement that’s way too long,” most viewers would have swiped away as soon as they realized that it was exactly that. Instead, the spot continues to defy expectations throughout, throwing curveball after curveball, taking the viewer on an unexpected and unpredictable journey.
By doing so, they kept viewers engaged and intrigued throughout the entire runtime and created a spot that somehow feels no longer than two or three minutes.
While the precise completion rates of the spot haven’t been shared publicly, the comments are chock full of viewers remarking how stunned they were to realize they finished the whole thing. “Y’all got me watching this whole ad,” said one highly upvoted comment, while another said, “Never thought I’d watch a 10 min TikTok but here we are.”
Rewarding viewer attention
As the spot goes on, it gradually heightens in intensity, pacing and the frequency of pattern-breaking. By the end of the spot we’ve had multiple shifts in reality, where we’ve gone from watching the advertisement, to watching people realize they’re in an advertisement, to watching people actually in the process of making the advertisement, to watching the people who made the advertisement debate the advertisement, to watching those people themselves enjoying a stay at Hilton—before culminating in a Gregory Brothers musical remix that samples lines of dialogue from the entire spot.
