Why Ice Spice Is All Over Your Feeds
One of the biggest shifts that came with the cultural dominance of TikTok is the upheaval in how new products, people, and properties are discovered and build loyalty. If you do the math of average daily time spent (95 minutes) / average view time per content (5 seconds), these (yes sometimes ambiguous analytics) numbers suggest that the average TikTok user is seeing at least over 1,000 pieces of content a day on the platform alone. And that's being conservative in our number crunching.
This volume of exposure continues to minimize the distance between awareness and conversion in ways we've never seen. 23 year old talent, Ice Spice, is a success story emerging out of these changing creator/consumer dynamics. Ice Spice launched into mainstream through TikTok and just this week has landed a spot on the top 15 of Billboard 100 with Boy's a Liar, Pt. 2. Lil Nas X even dressed as her this past Halloween! She is breaking through with unique tactics that illuminate several angles of inspiration for marketing broadly:
A SIGNATURE VISUAL DEVICE: Ice Spice's signature orange hair serves as a visual device that travels easily across social, helping every impression she makes through content to enable audiences to easily recall the brand that fed it to them (similar to that Hulu signature green).
AN UNAPOLOGETIC SENSE OF SELF: Ice Spice's style is anchored in a personal POV, an emerging value proposition in the era of algorithmic discovery and talent being overly styled based on obvious trends (see: Diplo Wears the Viral Big Red Boots). Ice Spice has said that “I feel like a lot of the time, stylists will not even match your energy. They’ll try to make you a new person, and I don’t f*ck with that.”
SOCIAL PERSONALITY ENGRAINED IN THE PRODUCT: The social nature of her Entertainment product is not an afterthought limited to campaign behavior or community management guidelines. It is at the core of the creative process: Ice Spice's lyrical writing process takes into account how well a line can be repurposed as a social caption or comment.
FAN IDENTITY, NOT AN AUDIENCE: Ice Spice's fans feel part of a social collective that goes by names Spice Cabinet, Spice Cadets, or Munchkins. To this community, she is the "People’s Princess". An important fan dynamic in the era of social that we sometimes lose sight of by habitually thinking of audiences as "consumers" versus a community who feels seen by someone or something.