DUBAI: TikTok has announced the winners of its second agency competition, Rock the Tok.

The competition, which is open to marketers, creatives and advertisers from agencies across the Middle East, Turkiye and Pakistan, is aimed at offering agencies an opportunity to showcase their most creative campaigns.

“It is a testament to the passion and ingenuity of the agency ecosystem of the region that we’re seeing creatives, strategists and marketers embrace these kinds of challenges,” said Jovana Jovanovic, regional head of creative agency partnerships at TikTok.

This year’s competition was launched in July with an open invitation to creative, media, social and digital agencies to submit a best-in-class campaign that ran in the first half of 2022 on TikTok.

The competition received entries from across the region with a record increase in entries from Saudi Arabia and Egypt indicating the growing popularity of TikTok in these countries.

TikTok partnered with independent industry body The Marketing Society and its regional creative council to form a jury panel, which also featured senior leaders from TikTok.

FP7 McCann Dubai won the TikTokers’ Choice Award for McDonald’s, while McCann Commonwealth won the Best Organic Content award for Chevrolet Arabia, and Peace Cake won the Innovative Use of Platform award for Netflix.

The FP7 McCann team said: “This is proof of our dedication to creating an agency culture — working in tandem with a platform partner like TikTok — to nourish our teams and deliver meaningful connections to our clients.”

For McCann Commonwealth, the campaign and award are a result of their new strategy. The client and agency wanted to “switch from being a brand that creates ads, to a brand that adds value through content,” said the team behind the winning campaign.

The automotive sector has always inspired great fan-created content and “we’re just following the trend,” they explained.

The award is a testament to creativity and authenticity being the key to creating viral and effective content on TikTok, they added.

For independent agency Peace Cake, which “lives and breathes content,” the award is a “great encouragement for us, our brilliant team, and our pioneering client,” said Randa Habib, account lead and operations manager at the agency.

“TikTok is a platform that has always inspired creativity and brought joy to the community,” said Youssef Gaddallah, head of business marketing and creative strategy for MENA Services, KSA and North Africa at TikTok.

“It is clear that leading agencies and creatives in the region have tapped into the power of the platform and relish the challenge to create content that has a lasting impact,” he said.