🔥Hot🔥 on TikTok 2.25
Feb 18-25: This week's top trends, sounds, new features, and Gen Z expressions.
Welcome to the sixth edition of 🔥Hot🔥 on TikTok - a weekly analysis of trending topics and sounds on TikTok, new feature announcements, the latest in Gen Z lingo, and brand case studies. This week, we discuss comedic meme formats, the origins of most Gen Z expressions, and exciting new features.
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Top TikTok Trends
🔀 1 + 2 = My head is a screw
The hottest trend of the week? моя голова винтом, a new meme format where 2-3 scenes of different subjects are juxtaposed against each other, followed by a long angle shot of the subjects dancing in a circle, crisscrossing their arms. Here’s an example.
This format aims to show 2 or more subjects (that are opposites) uniting. Some more popular videos include shots of friends with completely different personalities (one who’s always late, one who’s always early) dancing together in the final shot to complete the joke (the friend who’s always late joins the dance a few seconds later). This version is my personal favorite.
The meme is set up so that the ending or the “punchline” of the joke reveals some kind of unspoken insight about the subjects or parties involved. We’re starting to see more advanced variations of this trend as niche communities adapt it to their own topics and themes.
Application for brands: Brands can easily tap into this trend by pairing one of their popular products with an extreme user with interesting/relatable behaviors.
Example: Hefty trash bag brand - Roommate who never takes out the trash x Hefty extra-strong jumbo trash bags -> never taking out the trash. This helps convey the strength of their trash bags and also subtly makes fun of their audience’s behavior.
Brands can also leverage this trend if they offer two or more products that complement each other and have the products dancing together in the final shot.
Example: Morphe makeup brand example: Drawer full of eyeshadow palettes x 1 single favorite eyeshadow brush -> never cleaning your makeup brush.
😱 Bold but low key anxious
TikTokers are revealing the bold actions they take (like sending a risky text) that actually make them reeeaaalllyyy nervous deep down. The trend starts with the subject’s portrayal of the “bold action” with text overlay describing the act, and ends with their hand reaching for something (glass of water or their phone) and shaking aggressively.
Application for brands: This meme is ALL about human behavior, so brands can focus on their customers’ specific pain points and what gets them nervous in situations that involve their product.
Example: Domino’s pizza delivery app - Gen Z customer who has anxiety about speaking on the phone, calling to order pizza for the first time. Copy addressing the pain point with a CTA to download the app instead.
🤬 Comeback but make it ✨ dramatic ✨
This trend is an adaptation from an old sound, where the user anticipates an insult and responds with an epic comeback. It’s currently at the height of its popularity, with multiple niche versions (I’ve seen a Sims version where the entire voiceover is in Simlish, and a cat version where the cat roasts his owner).
Application for brands: If your brand uses more casual language when you speak with your customers (like Wendy’s Twitter account), this is an opportunity for you to roast them, or even roast your competitors (Wendy’s vs. McDonald’s).
Top sounds of the week
New features and effects
📄 App Attachment
TikTok rolled out a recipe attachment earlier this month in collaboration with Whisk, a cooking and recipe saver app. Now they’re testing new kinds of attachments with other apps like Breathwrk, a breathing/meditation app. It’s similar to Facebook’s Playable Ads for gaming, where you can test out the product before downloading the actual app in the App Store.
📆 Post Scheduling
TikTok is now allowing users to schedule their posts instead of uploading natively on the app! Check out the instructions here:
Trending Lingo
Top Expressions of the Week
If you’ve ever downloaded TikTok or watch Reels, you may be familiar with many popular “Gen Z” phrases used on there, like “deadass,” “PERIODT,” “Chile, anyways so” or “it’s the ___ for me.” You may not know this yet, but these are examples of AAVE (African American Vernacular English), a dialect of American English with its own unique syntactic structures, vocabulary, and pronunciations. With the rise of TikTok, non-Black people are unaware of the origins of these expressions and mistake them for “Gen Z slang” or “Internet stan culture.” It’s important that we recognize and honor Black culture and the many ways Black people have contributed to TikTok’s culture, music, and all the memes. That’s why in future newsletters, I’ll aim to provide the original sources of where these expressions came from in the definition section!
1️⃣ Choccy milk make the pain go away
Definition: “Pop a choccy milk” or choccy milk make the pain go away” refers to a TikTok trend in which the user states that they’re sad through the text-to-speech feature, then makes a glass of instant chocolate milk, adding way too much chocolate powder, to “take away the pain.” You can use this saying whenever you’re struggling/having a bad day.
2️⃣ 🦟 🐜 🦟 🐜 🦟 🐜
Definition: An emoji expression to convey dancing or more specifically, “throwing it back.” Users usually reference this expression when a video has a really catchy song.
🔥 HOT 🔥 Brand Case Study: Taco Bell
This is a recent campaign from Taco Bell to promote their $5 cravings box that netted over 69.3M views and 521K engagements.
Most of the top-voted comments were positive and actually relevant to the content of the ad (instead of too many POV comments).
Let’s break down what Taco Bell did well:
The first sentence “LET’S BUILD YOUR OWN $5 CRAVINGS BOX” directly called out the user and generated a sense of involvement. The text used a font similar to the TikTok native font, making it blend more seamlessly with UGC.
The ad used a “Choose your own adventure” style of storytelling, similar to the Instagram polling feature, with controversial options (BAJA blast vs. any other drink) to spark discussion in the comments.
It leveraged a popular TikTok format from just a few months ago, where users are presented with 2 options and run towards their preferred option. The format hasn’t completely died out yet, so it was still relevant.
The ad used a recognizable song, which made it seem less like an ad and more like UGC.
💩 NOT 💩 Brand Case Study
Here’s a Verizon ad from the Superbowl that got 23.2M views and 481K engagements.
The ad received no top comments at all (most liked comments got 1-3 likes each) and had very little engagement with the content of the ad.
Why did this campaign flop:
The pacing of the ad’s content was very slow and used mostly static imagery with powerpoint-like animations, which would work better for an Instagram Stories ad (but not for TikTok).
The ad was supposedly for “Small Businesses,” but did not offer any information beyond a simple caption “Verizon Big Concert for Small Business.” The copy or visual assets did not indicate anything about the target audience or offer any information about the event, triggering lots of confusion in the comments.
That’s all for now, but…
Is there a topic you would be interested in reading about? Or a campaign you’d like me to cover? I’d love to hear your thoughts! You can respond to this email or comment below. 💕
Until next week,
Stephanie
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Written by Stephanie Jin, a creative strategist, art director, and copywriter based in NYC. Connect with me on Twitter or Instagram.
i live for the bold but low key anxious ones