How One TikTok Comment Earned Ricola 47 Million Views
A spontaneous TikTok comment turned into an award-winning creator campaign. Verena Gründel explores how Ricola and Maraam show why successful brand collaborations require a willingness to give up some control.
What Ricola and Maraam Got Right
No pitch, no call for submissions, no creator database. A single comment under a TikTok video was all it took to bring Ricola and Maraam together — and ultimately earn 47 million views and a Best Brand Collab Award.
When creator Maraam went viral with her yodeling videos, Swiss candy brand Ricola posted a comment directly under her clip, challenging her to yodel a Ricola song. Maraam activated her community, collected ideas and sounds, and used them to record “Fühl dich bonbon”: a catchy song complete with a music video in which she dances and flies through the Alps with a cow, as if in a fever dream.
On October 29, the team from Ricola, WeCreate, and Maraam won the Best Brand Collab Award at the VideoDays Awards, which we at DMEXCO present in partnership with Campaign Germany. A panel of industry experts had selected five finalists from 41 submissions, and the Campaign community voted to choose the winning campaign.
“I wonder what our CEO will say about this?” Fabian Welschoff, Senior Brand Manager at Ricola, asked himself when the campaign was approved, as he openly admitted earlier in a conversation with Campaign’s deputy editor-in-chief, Nina Kirst.
To me, the real lesson lies in that brief hesitation. When you work with creators, you get their sense of humor and their aesthetic, not just reach among young target audiences. The long-standing brand Ricola stuck with it, and the numbers prove them right: 47 million views in total, with 10.1 million alone for the music video on its own TikTok channel.
I find it at least as remarkable that Ricola didn’t disappear again after that viral moment. The collaboration continued for the launch of Fresh Mint this summer, and Maraam was back on board. After all, the strongest collaborations happen when brands don’t just book a campaign, but build a relationship.
By the way, Maraam had to go on stage twice that evening. She also won in the Comedy category. Congratulations from the DMEXCO team.
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