Out-of-phone: What happens when creator content leaves the feed?

In Asia’s hyper-competitive consumer landscape, marketers are feeling the heat. With social feeds flooded, ad budgets stretched, and digital behaviours fragmenting, attention has become a scarce commodity. Yet even as performance marketing dominates the conversation, a quiet rebalancing is underway. Brand awareness—long considered the top of the funnel and now often dismissed in favour of short-term ROI—is regaining its strategic importance.

In saturated, mobile-first markets, some even argue it may be the only sustainable way to cut through.

This is the challenge that L’Oréal and TikTok tackled in their late 2024 cross-market campaign spanning Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia (with results now available). Instead of focusing on clicks and short-term metrics, the campaign posed a deeper question: What happens when creator-led content—designed for TikTok’s highly personal, sound-on, thumb-stopping feed—is adapted for large-scale public spaces? Could the same content perform as effectively on a six-storey screen in Malaysia’s city centre as it does on someone’s phone?

The mechanism for this experiment was TikTok’s Out of Phone (OOP) initiative—a format launched in 2023 that allows brands to scale TikTok-native creative into premium digital out-of-home (DOOH) environments. With a single media buy, advertisers can take creator content that’s already performing in-feed and amplify it across public locations, from train stations and malls to retail storefronts and high-traffic roadways. The idea isn’t to replace traditional out-of-home—or TikTok itself—but to create cohesion across media experiences that have historically remained siloed.

“We’re not trying to take over the OOH world or compete with traditional media buying,” says Dan Page, global head of partnerships, new screens, at TikTok to Campaign. “We’re here to complement. If you’re already investing in out-of-home, why not make that investment more interactive, more authentic, and more reflective of how your brand lives in culture?”

Page, who has spent over 20 years in media and entertainment and now leads TikTok’s new screens division, helped spearhead the OOP rollout globally. Originally piloted in North America, the format has since gained traction as a creative and strategic extension for TikTok campaigns, particularly in retail and beauty.

“What’s powerful is that this content doesn’t feel like traditional advertising,” he says. “It feels familiar. When you see a creator you follow demoing a product—and then see that same creator on a digital billboard—it bridges the gap between platforms. It makes the experience feel continuous.”

For L’Oréal, the opportunity to experiment with cross-screen continuity aligned with broader brand-building objectives in SAPMENA—one of the company’s fastest-growing zones, encompassing South Asia, the Pacific, the Middle East and North Africa. The campaign focused on L’Oréal Paris’ Glycolic-Bright Melasyl range, with content centred on education, efficacy and skin confidence—core themes for skincare consumers across Southeast Asia.

The campaign was rolled out in Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia, chosen not only for their demographic scale and mobile maturity but for their diverse outdoor media environments. In Jakarta, notorious traffic congestion creates natural dwell time for roadside displays. Bangkok, among the most saturated OOH markets in the world, presented a challenge in visual cut-through. Malaysia offered a more nuanced opportunity to test skincare messaging across multi-ethnic consumer groups and varying skin concerns.

“We wanted to test how storytelling could travel,” says Abhishek Grover, chief digital officer for L’Oréal’s consumer products division in SAPMENA. “How do we connect what we’re saying in someone’s TikTok feed with what they see in their everyday physical environment—on their way to work, in a mall, outside a retail outlet?”

Against this backdrop, the OOP approach offered a point of contrast to traditional OOH campaigns, which often rely on static visuals and one-way messaging. According to post-campaign research, 64% of consumers said they learned something new about the brand, while 60% described the campaign as more authentic—a notable shift from the perceptions often associated with conventional billboards. Instead of polished celebrity visuals or broad brand slogans, the creative featured TikTok-native storytelling, led by real creators familiar to regional audiences.

In markets like Indonesia and Thailand—where consumers encounter content across both mobile and physical spaces—Grover points to the growing challenge of media fatigue. “There are thousands of beauty brands infiltrating Southeast Asian markets with these kinds of messages. How do you cut through?” he says. “You need to act like a leader. Not everything can be about conversion. Sometimes, it’s about making a statement.”

That statement, in this case, came through format and tone. The OOP experiment gave L’Oréal a way to test participatory, creator-led narratives in media environments traditionally built for top-down delivery. “The typical out-of-home format is static,” Grover says, reflecting on the Indonesian market specifically. “It’s not contextualised. It doesn’t speak the way today’s audiences expect content to speak.”

L’Oréal' x TikTok's out-of-phone billboard in Singapore.

The campaign leaned heavily into TikTok’s native aesthetic—creator-led content that was local, educational, and rooted in product storytelling. There were no glossy, high-budget edits. Instead, creators demonstrated how to use the product, what it looked like on different skin tones, and what results to expect. These same videos were then adapted for out-of-home—subtitled, resized and repositioned for public environments—and delivered across premium digital placements via TikTok’s media network.

“You can’t just take a 9:16 video and plonk it on a billboard,” says Grover. “That was one of our biggest learnings. The content has to be fit for platform. You need to design for both—sound-on, interactive TikTok and silent, ambient OOH.”

A lift in attention—and intent

To assess effectiveness, TikTok partnered with Kantar to conduct a full ad effectiveness study, using a survey-based control versus exposed methodology. The only variable between groups was exposure to the combined TikTok and OOP campaign. The study measured a range of metrics: Top-of-mind awareness, unaided and aided recall, brand trust, favourability, variant recognition, purchase intent, brand affinity, and recommendation—across both total brand and product variant levels.

The results were clear: The combined TikTok and OOP campaign outperformed L’Oréal's consumer products division's previous TikTok-only benchmarks across both awareness and intent. Uplifts were especially strong among 31–44-year-old consumers, a segment that responded positively to the blend of credibility (conferred by public presence) and authenticity (delivered by creator storytelling). “That age group aligns well with our skincare focus—they’re looking for efficacy, backed by science,” Grover notes. “The brand’s legacy helped, but the creators made it relatable.”

Interestingly, younger audiences were less responsive to the OOH layer—not because it lacked relevance, but because their priorities differ. “For younger consumers, we need to speak more to prevention, routines and self-expression,” says Grover. “This format still has potential there, but the messaging needs to shift.”

L’Oréal' x TikTok's out-of-phone billboard in Malaysia.

Seasonal timing and product launches also emerged as high-potential windows for OOP. “When you want to build fast awareness or ride high intent—like in gifting periods or back-to-school—that’s where this shines,” Grover says. “The reach is immediate, but the creative still feels personal. That’s a rare combination.”

In Southeast Asia, these calendar moments carry a different kind of weight. From Ramadan to Chinese New Year, from mid-year mega-sales to Singles’ Day, regional audiences are primed for contextual relevance, and platforms that can connect cultural cues with mass visibility tend to outperform. “Awareness spikes in Asia aren’t just about visibility,” Grover explains. “They’re about timeliness, sentiment and social proof. If people see content they recognise, from creators they trust, in public places, that’s a powerful form of validation.”

This local nuance proved especially valuable in markets like Thailand, where public spaces are not just transit zones but places of discovery, and Indonesia, where screen saturation doesn’t automatically translate to attention. “You can’t assume that being seen means being remembered,” Page adds. “That’s why the familiarity of TikTok creators was so important here. It wasn’t a billboard talking at you. It was someone you already followed showing up in the physical world.”

L’Oréal' x TikTok's out-of-phone billboard in Bangkok.

The campaign also created unexpected upside in the form of earned media. Creators featured on billboards began documenting their appearances and sharing them back on TikTok—creating a feedback loop of organic content that reinforced the brand’s story across platforms. “When you see yourself on a massive screen, you’re going to post it,” laughs Page. “That feedback loop is incredibly powerful. It turns your media buy into creator celebration.”

“You’re not just engaging followers,” Grover adds. “You’re signalling to creators that you value them, that they’re part of something bigger. That becomes part of your brand equity, not just with audiences, but with the people who shape what your audiences believe.”

Creators, credibility and what comes next

This, in turn, helped foster creator loyalty—something Grover sees as increasingly vital in a category where endorsement fatigue is real. “Beauty is a flirtatious category,” he says. “Today’s user switches brands easily. But when creators feel genuinely part of your journey—not just a campaign, but part of your visibility—they stay.”

Still, both Grover and Page are clear that OOP is not a plug-and-play format. “It’s not a one-size-fits-all,” says Page. “The creative has to be right. The brand needs to be open to thinking in platform-native ways. And the objectives have to be aligned, this isn’t just a vanity placement.”

Grover adds that measurement needs to evolve alongside the format. “We need more sophisticated frameworks, not just for awareness, but for long-term brand equity. And we need to define what success looks like beyond last-click.”

Looking ahead, both parties are exploring retail media as the next evolution. TikTok piloted OOP retail in Canada with Sephora—placing TikTok content in-store next to the products being sold. L’Oréal sees huge potential for a similar move in Asia. “Imagine browsing skincare and seeing creators explain the product in real time, not to sell, but to educate,” Grover says. “That’s where real value is created. And that’s the kind of moment we want to enable.”

Ultimately, the campaign was less about reach and more about relevance—understanding how platforms, people and places interact. “This was never about replacing anything,” says Page. “It’s about extending what already works—and meeting audiences where they are, with the content they trust.”

As the borders between physical and digital continue to collapse, and as consumer journeys grow less linear by the day, campaigns like this suggest that the future of brand building may not be about more channels—but about fewer walls between them.