Inside the 2025 TikTok Ad Awards: What defined a winning campaign in Germany – Fortune

How Accenture Song group creative director Giuliana Jelko defines great TikTok creativity.
For brands with bold ideas and creative ambition, TikTok has proven to be a powerful outlet for inspiring audiences and deepening engagement. Through short-form video, the platform has transformed how people consume content, connect with brands, and make purchasing decisions.
Now in its fourth year, the TikTok Ad Awards celebrate the brands and agencies that dare to think differently with campaigns that have entertained communities, sparked imagination, and delivered measurable impact.
Fortune Brand Studio spoke with the industry leaders who judged this year’s contenders for TikTok’s top honors. Here’s what they revealed about what makes a campaign truly stand out on TikTok.
Giuliana Jelko is the group creative director at Accenture Song and based in Hamburg, Germany. With 13 years of experience in the industry, she has spent much of her career devising exceptional social media content for clients. Here, she shares how TikTok is raising the bar for short-form storytelling—and how advertisers on the platform can turn fleeting attention into lasting engagement.
Trends move fast on TikTok. How do you handle the pace?
We have a whole team dedicated to keeping on top of trends. It’s basically their job to sit on their phones and check the internet.
Trends make people go to your profile. What happens on your profile makes them follow and stay. But that doesn’t mean you should jump on every trend. First, we check if the trend is a good match for the brand’s voice. We ask, ‘Does it fit? Does it work?’
We know trends get attention, but we can’t build a brand on them. And it’s okay to not always get it right. We try things out and learn from it.
What distinguishes a one-off success from a campaign with longevity?
We don’t think about a special key performance indicator at the start. We ask, ‘What do we want people to talk about?’ The videos need to give viewers something to have an opinion about. Otherwise, it’s just a brand “blah-blah-blahing” into the void, and nobody’s talking back.
It’s important that each brand finds its own tone of voice—are you cheerful, are you helpful? And it needs a whole personality: your flaws, your icks, the jokes with the community. That’s very important to figure out, and that’s something that we always try to set up with a brand before we start working with them.
And then if you keep hitting the same personality notes, people will understand who you are. If you present yourself as vulnerable or can make fun of your own brand, people are more interested because it doesn’t feel polished—it feels human.
How do you balance creativity with performance?
Performance is important, but TikTok ads need imperfection—you should feel there’s a person behind it, not something crafted in a lab. It needs to feel real and breathe, and that’s how you can ensure performance.
If one thing doesn’t perform, try the next thing. Sometimes a native asset gets 3 million views, but people won’t remember it. We also run more polished campaigns on TikTok, with a creator from TikTok, so it merges both. People often remember those assets better because they see 10,000 videos. Something that stands out a bit more is remembered—but it needs TikTok insiders, jokes, and language.
Tell us about a campaign you’re proud of.
In 2024, we worked with a German Schlager singer who had a viral German YouTube video 20 years ago, but it was mostly forgotten. His original song fit our brief, we rewrote it, and TikTok went crazy for it. After the campaign, he went on tour again, and people bought tickets because they had kind of forgotten about his music, but through the ads, they were reminded. Now, his career has been revived, which is really cool.
What’s your advice for brands trying to emulate that success?
Finding your own personality on the platform is key. Decide how you want to talk—and stick with it. Figure out what people think about you; it often doesn’t match the internal perspective of the brand. And then, once you’ve found your personality, start a conversation, start inside jokes, and keep trying different things.
What do you think about purpose-driven work on TikTok?
Purpose never works when it’s declared. It needs to feel honest and be consistent—you can’t do one big manifesto and never talk about it again. And even though TikTok is a fun platform, there’s space for highly emotional things.
What are your thoughts on the importance of creative risk-taking?
You need trust between brand and agency to react quickly. Otherwise, you’re not going to publish content fast enough to catch trends. People watch thousands of videos a day—they won’t remember everything—so be comfortable with risk. If the trust is there, you can do great stuff together.
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