Who wondered what a Smurf would look like if it had lifelike physical characteristics… as you do.

Fast forward nine years, and it’s an internet sensation on the app, accompanied by its own Russian hashtag #шайлушай, inside jokes, and almost always paired with the lyrics “we live, we love, we lie” from The Spectre by Alan Walker.

At this point in time, Smurf cat was a viral sensation with users, but almost no brands had engaged with the content yet. Specsavers’s TikTok strategy is to spot emerging trends and create on-brand content to put the brand at the centre of attention. This was a strange, but a valid opportunity and the Mint team spotted it immediately. But how do we make it relevant to Specsavers? We have achieved success in the past when utilising the Specsavers ‘admin’ tone of voice – adding small, quirky branded assets to a seemingly unconnected trend. The TikTok audience responds well to this type of content.

For Smurf cat, the idea was simple. Add a pair of glasses and join in.

On social media, pace is so important. If you’re not first, you might as well be last. That’s why Mint guarantees high speed content delivery when opportunities present themselves.

After being approved, we published the video immediately, and waited, confident our strategic intuition was right.

And it was! We watched as the views and engagement rocketed, even commented on the video ourselves with an inside joke, saying “this isn’t loading for me but if it’s the Smurf cat wearing a pair of glasses I’m losing my mind” which got 19.8k likes alone. Weeks later, we still receive engagement on it, even though the trend has passed.

As of October, it’s sitting at 1.9M views, 266.4 likes and 74.5k shares. Showing that intuition is everything, and being at the start of weird and wonderful TikTok trends is the place to be.