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May 12, 2025

Connecting to Your Social Audience with Brand Characters

Alex Conger - Senior Social Media Manager

Alex is a seasoned marketing professional and creator working with entertainment leaders, celebrities, influencers, and a renowned art museum. She specializes in social-first content creation with her short-form videos, photos, and graphics making impactful connections on behalf of brands large and small.

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May 12, 2025

Connecting with your social media audience is an integral part of creating successful brand content. Brands can achieve this in a multitude of ways — from utilizing influencer campaigns, brand promotions with celebrities and podcasters or even creating one-off viral moments. One additional prominent way we are seeing brands tackle this is by implementing the use of characters.

Characters aren’t limited to a certain brand archetype and are being seen across the spectrum from brands like Duolingo, Pop-Tarts, Dunkin’, Domino’s, McDonald’s and even Scrub Daddy. Brand characters are popping up in social media content, marketing events and even in day-to-day pop culture. Duolingo even recently orchestrated a social-driven stunt where they killed off their popular character, driving massive conversation online, only to bring the character back later.

For social media content, characters alleviate some of the typical roadblocks for marketers as they open avenues for new content themes, avoid talent restrictions and costly studio shoots, and allow for easy participation in trending lo-fi videos.

For our client affresh^® appliance care, we wanted to give the cleaning product — in the form of its green box — its own character-style personality. We started out with commonly used filters on social platforms like TikTok, which added expressive, comical eyes and a mouth. Using those filters allowed us to tap into trends and universally understood social lingo, but only allowed us to develop static content.

We wanted to do more to bring this personality to life in video. Platforms like TikTok offer built-in tools, such as Effect House, that make it easy to create, test, and upload augmented reality filters. The 9Rooftops Social Media Team used one of these tools to develop a custom filter, allowing us to create video content and share it with the community for broader use.

@affreshappliancecare Oh heck nah. #AffreshClean #CleaningHumor ♬ original sound – affresh® appliance care

With the AR filter live, it has allowed us to do more reactionary-style content, showing emotive gesturing, and more skit-based content that’s often seen and used in trends. Additionally, the filter is available for anyone on the TikTok platform to use. This could lead to endless amounts of user-generated content and new interactions with followers and non-followers.

With this new avenue for content creation for our client, we’ve seen an uptick in several KPIs across their social platforms as our team has created more trending and relatable content on a quicker turnaround time — further demonstrating the power of a brand character on social.

Why should a brand consider using a character and creating a personality for social?

• Becomes easier to make trending videos and opens more avenues for content
• Creates memorable, relatable and recognizable content
• Builds a bond with the consumer
• Reduces the need for talent or in-agency individuals on photo shoots
• Low costs with potentially high rewards