This past October, Apple introduced the world’s first iPhone mini. An iconic new design, in new colors, and a revolutionarily small size.

The brief was simple, and expansive—get the world excited about the arrival of iPhone 12 mini. While mass comms was already in the works to launch the family of four new iPhone 12 devices on a grand scale, we wanted to narrow our focus and create something that could truly impact culture in a mini way.

We looked no further than the most influential generation on earth when it comes to shaping culture with short form content: TikTok.

The idea behind #makeitmini centered around a simple move— tap something to make it mini—and turned it into an innovative creative challenge. Jump cuts are a huge part of the visual language on TikTok, so we decided to make them the core device used for shrinking.

Before issuing our challenge we wanted to share some amazing inspiration to kick it off. Knowing the influence and respect TikTok’s top creators carry within the community, we partnered with four that best represented the editing style of TikTok, premiumness of Apple, power of mini and real-life usage of iPhone to create our launch video. To the beat of hot-fire music track “Woo” by Wande, the creators found fun and creative ways to tap everyday objects and make them mini, before shrinking the iPhone 12 Pro Max into its mini sibling. Their huge followings were then invited to make their own videos through the official #makeitmini Challenge page.

Every aspect of the #makeitmini Challenge was designed to feel native to the platform. We chose creators with a unique creative flair, strong video-editing skillset and engaged followers. And we gave them freedom to answer our brief in their own way—ensuring their output would feel authentic, not over-engineered.

Music was also crucial. We went with “Woo” by Wande for its perfect mix of energy and style, while also coming from an undiscovered artist we knew the community would love.

We designed the challenge to live both organically and in paid to ensure we could scale quickly. We rotated the four creator videos in the top feed, and promoted a beautiful paid banner on the Discover page to alert the community to the challenge. All UGC videos were then aggregated on both the official challenge and “Woo” song pages.

The #makeitmini challenge instantly took off with our videos blowing ad benchmarks out of the water. With almost six billion views, the #makeitmini challenge generated 850 million engagements at an ER of 18%, beating the TikTok benchmark by 25%. Our Top View and in-feed ads got over 112 million views, crushing all of TikTok’s benchmarks across CTR and ER.

And it wasn’t just our videos that were getting traction. It was clear the community were intrigued by the phone itself too, and they were talking mini. In 48 hours, uses of #iphone12mini grew from 20 million, to 140 million — and we didn’t even promote that hashtag. Yes, it's also important to sell product: clicks to the .COM product page exceeded benchmarks by 3x.