RoC Skincare names Gravity Road as its TikTok agency of record—inside the growing trend

In its new role, Gravity Road—which is part of global marketing tech group The Brandtech Group and has worked on campaigns for Crocs, Oreo, Pokémon Go creator Niantic and TikTok itself—will oversee all of RoC’s creator-driven TikTok campaigns. Though TikTok has been part of RoC’s social strategy since 2021, the brand launched an influencer-oriented refresh on the platform in partnership with Gravity Road this March. 

“We felt that given the scale that we're seeing on TikTok through organic conversation and campaign activity, it was really time to bring in an agency partner to help us scale as we go forward,” Hillary Hutcheson, RoC’s chief marketing officer, told Ad Age. “We have over 400 million views right now on the hashtag #RoCSkincare, and we really wanted to step up our game … and make a targeted effort to go after Gen Z.”

Prior to beginning its relationship with Gravity Road, RoC had relied on one in-house employee to oversee its social media content and influencer partnerships, Hutcheson said, with support from communications agency M Booth to maintain its partnerships with dermatologist influencers such as Scott Walker and Muneeb Shah. 

RoC is jumping into its new partnership with Gravity Road by pivoting the brand’s overarching Look Forward Project, launched in 2022, toward adolescent and young adult consumers with a TikTok-oriented campaign. For the new TikTok push, called #BeARoc, the brand worked with Gravity Road to identify over two dozen beauty influencers, including Mikayla Nogueira, Stephanie Valentine (also known as Glamzilla) and Miah Carter, to share what they would say to their younger selves as they film themselves using RoC products in a “get ready with me”-style video. 

As part of the #BeARoc campaign, Gravity Road also brought RoC ambassador Sarah Jessica Parker to TikTok to help kickstart these conversations and react to old interview footage of herself. 

Since launching the TikTok campaign earlier this month, RoC has seen a 48% boost in traffic to its website. And even before this TikTok push, RoC has consistently been seeing “double-digit growth over the past several years,” with TikTok playing a large role in that boost, Hutcheson said. The brand will continue to post content on Instagram, but plans to put greater emphasis on TikTok moving forward by launching educational and influencer-centric campaigns on the platform to connect with the large Gen Z user base there, she said. 

Are TikTok agencies of record here to stay?

Within just a matter of weeks, both Stanley and RoC appointed TikTok agencies of record—and Brendan Gahan, partner and chief social officer at creative agency Mekanism, isn’t surprised by this pattern. Rather, he views it as a symptom of an “increasingly fractured” social media landscape and a combination of increased production needs and “platform nuances” unique to TikTok, said. 

“Even within TikTok, there’s content; there’s TikTok Live, which is a whole other dynamic; and then if you want to go even deeper, there’s [TikTok] Shop,” Gahan said. “And when you layer on keeping up with trends and these other nuances, the platform in itself is so vast, and some form of expertise goes a long way.”

Also read: TikTok opens search ads to all advertisers

To Gahan, a brand bringing on an agency specializing in TikTok “can make a lot of sense” based on the brand’s “priorities, resources and bandwidth,” he said. But “going with a TikTok agency [of record] isn’t a surefire way to be successful” on the platform, Gahan added. Instead, he attributes success on the platform to how well the brand’s content aligns with the platform’s “make TikToks, not ads” mantra—whether that content is produced in-house, by a broader social media agency or by a TikTok agency of record. 

On the other hand, Kenny Gold, managing director and head of social, content and influencer at Deloitte Digital, considers the back-to-back agency of record appointments “more of a novelty than a trend.” He understands the value of having a “channel-specific agency, especially in the current social media ecosystem in which each platform is “strong and individual in [its] own right, and the way you strategize and create for each one is also individual,” he said. But at the same time, a brand isolating its TikTok approach from its larger social media strategy can make it more difficult for the brand to adapt that strategy as social platforms shift and the brand’s audience evolves, he added. 

“If brands want to try it and their budgets have the ability to handle it, that’s great, and I think more brands will try it,” Gold said. “I think it’s a strategy for brands that might not necessarily know how to navigate TikTok quite yet, so they opt to bring in someone who’s highly specialized. It’s kind of like you’re going to the hospital to find a doctor that knows how to operate on your hand. You’ll probably want the hand surgeon to fix your hand, and I get it, but you’d also hope that the ER doctor would know how to fix your whole body, including your hand.”

Gold suggests brands hire creators with first-hand experience producing content for TikTok to help them shape their TikTok strategies. Several brands and agencies have already begun partnering with creators to fill the production gaps that both Gold and Gahan point to as a driving force behind brands’ growing interest in TikTok agencies of record. 

Read more: Creators are becoming strategists for brands

“Over time, we’ve learned that [social media] is an ever-changing business,” Gold said. “The minute you write something down on paper, it's obsolete. So, it's better to be prepared by understanding your audience than being prepared for just one channel.”