Can one of the largest companies in the world roll out a logo designed by a Tiktoker to the tune of a song ridiculing its founder?

The @Amazon Social team was looking to increase its following on Tiktok. Growth had been slow so far and the most popular Tiktok content around the brand was UGC set to the tune of “Jeffrey Bezos” a song skewering our founder.

Amazon sparked an organic collaboration with @emilyzugay, a TikToker making parody brand logos, set to a low quality recorder-flute performance of the “Jeffrey Bezos” song. The risky collaboration activated the content flywheel of new data and insights from customer responses, leading to new territories for content development.

The strategy was to activate a content flywheel which creates an ecosystem of content for harnessing data and insights to create tailored experiences meant to build brand love with customers. This increases our ability to participate in and even spark conversations that help customers understand the humanity of the brand.

The team consistently monitored TikTok for the right entry point for Amazon in this cultural moment. We engaged with @emilyzugay, a TikToker making parody brand logos with a simple comment, and over +137K people liked it – giving us the signal that we were on to something bigger.

The result was lo-fi, quick-turn video production. To make breakthrough content in this case, all we needed was a smart and relevant idea, a recorder, and social creatives with quick and solid editing skills. Speed outweighed high production quality for activating the social content flywheel as was evidenced in this particular scenario.

The Amazon Social team was looking to increase our following on TikTok. Using social listening we discovered Emily Zugay, a TikTok “designer” creating parody brand logos. We sent her a comment “Haven’t seen our logo, looks like we’re in the clear.” 138,000 people liked the comment and the next day she posted her “AmaSon” redesign. We continued the joke by quickly replying with a parody video of us rolling her logo out globally on AmaSon boxes, stores, trucks, and planes. We also made her logo our profile picture for brand handles including Prime Video, Alexa and Amazon Fashion. To thank her we shipped her a box filled with AmaSon branded merch, which she posted to her channels gaining even more buzz. The moment generated a total of 46.4 million views, 8.13M likes, 102.1K comments, 206.8K shares and a 30% increase in Tiktok followers in 48 hours. All with $0 budget.

The organic parody brand logo collaboration with @emilyzugay, created a viral moment and a top performing organic post to-date with +4.5M views, +838.8K likes (+13,850%), +11.9K comments (+3,123%), +33.6K shares (+45,405%), +65.7K followers by activating the content flywheel with zero production spend and media budget. This post had a positive sentiment score of 96% on a 300 comment sample, and engagement rate of 227%. With target audience on TikTok being Gen Z, 63% of Gen Z youth use TikTok on a daily basis. ROI is approximately $1M USD in earned media and digital value for this activation.