Nearly half of all TikTok trends are dead within five days, yet brands hire production crews, sign off budgets, and brief agencies to chase moments that have, by the time the content goes live, already peaked and begun their decline.
Those are the findings from Publicis’ new white paper launched in partnership with TikTok, titled Globalisation of TikTok Trends: How Culture Travels, Transforms and Connects. The study used Publicis's proprietary GrowthOS platform to crunch millions of data points from TikTok's top 200 trending hashtags across Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan over six months across 16 content categories. Two hard metrics that were mapped: persistence (how long a hashtag stayed in the Top 100 across multiple markets) and virality (spread across three or more countries).
Bhavna Shewakramani, solutions partner, APAC, Publicis Groupe, told Campaign Asia: “The trends that last are rarely the loudest or most novel. They endure because they tap into shared human emotions and everyday behaviours that people want to return to, not just react to once.”
Only 26.7% of trends persist beyond 14 days. A small subset survives beyond 100 days, linked to seasonal events, product launches, or what the report calls evergreen cultural relevance.
What keeps a trend alive past two weeks
To understand which trends beat the odds, the research team simultaneously looked at how long a hashtag stayed in TikTok's Top 100 (its staying power, or persistence), and how many countries it spread across (its virality). Plotted together, these metrics reveals a pattern and two types of content that consistently clear the 14-day mark.
The first type is the ‘utility hack’. These are practical, instructional trends which people save rather than just watch.
Vietnam's #Meovat, which translates simply as tips, is a good example here. It works like a crowdsourced classroom where one creator shares a cleaning trick, a cooking shortcut, or a life hack, and others film their own version and save the original for later.
"Users don't just watch a #Meovat tip; they save it to try later or film their own version of it. This creates a long-tail of engagement that keeps the hashtag in the Top 100 for months. The mechanism is simple: the format is reusable, so engagement compounds rather than spikes and disappears,” explains Shewakramani.
The second type is the ‘cultural anchor’.
These are trends rooted in tradition or shared identity and give people a reason to participate in something larger than themselves. Japan's #DanjiriFestival is the example the report uses. A centuries-old Osaka festival that, retold through creator-led video, became a shareable spectacle that travelled far beyond its home market. "These survive because they transform local customs into global expressions of identity," says Shewakramani. The key mechanism here is creator storytelling — the festival itself isn't new, but the way creators frame it makes it feel discoverable.
The commonality across both archetypes is that neither works as one-shot content. Both are template-based, where users are invited to take the idea and create their own version. A #Meovat tip can be recreated by anyone with a kitchen. A #DanjiriFestival video can inspire a creator in another country to document their own local tradition.
The inverse is also true. Trends built around a single moment, for example, a joke, a reaction to breaking news, a meme — burn fast precisely because there is nothing to remix. Once you've seen it, you've consumed it. There is no reason to return.
Southeast Asia is one market, as per the data
When the researchers mapped how often the same trending hashtags appear across different country pairs, Southeast Asia came out as the world's tightest cultural cluster, with a Jaccard similarity score of 0.68 out of 1.0.
To elaborate: Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam share nearly 70% of their trending content with each other. Surprisingly, even without a shared language, the culture built around humour sensibility means the markets have an appetite for the same content formats.
The commercial implication of this content cluster is direct. "With the rapid rise of social commerce in regions like Vietnam, a trend sparked in Jakarta can drive a purchase decision in Ho Chi Minh City within the same 24-hour cycle," says Shewakramani. "
What’s the direct implication for brands operating in the region?
Shewakramani explains, "Historically, brands have been siloed by national borders due to legacy media structures, but our research proves those borders are becoming increasingly irrelevant to how culture actually moves. Success in SEA means moving at the speed of the cluster, not the country. Brands that adopt this cluster-first mindset will effectively turn regional cultural momentum into lasting brand impact.”
The research suggests that campaigns seeded in one Southeast Asian market have a 60 to 70% chance of finding organic traction in neighbouring countries within days. Some clients, Shewakramani says, are already restructuring their approach to move toward what Publicis calls a geo-cluster model, in which a single flexible creative spine is built for the regional corridor rather than translated market-by-market. “It’s no longer about translating a global message; it’s about designing a regional corridor strategy.”
Japan is a different system
Interestingly, Japan sits at the other end of the spectrum. Its Jaccard Similarity score with neighbouring markets stays below 0.25, and statistically, there is almost no trend overlap. The report finds that Japan operates as a self-contained TikTok ecosystem, driven by a creator culture and aesthetic sensibility that prioritises visual form over text-heavy narrative.
The most common brand mistake, Shewakramani says, is attempting a regional rollout or literal translation for the Japanese market. "A copy-paste regional strategy is almost guaranteed to fail." The alternative is Publicis calls "bespoke localisation" or leaning into established local rituals rather than pushing a top-down global narrative.
As a reference point for what works: #เที่ยวญี่ปุ่นด้วยตัวเอง (Travel to Japan by Yourself), a hashtag rooted in a specific desire for self-guided exploration, persisted in the Top 100 for weeks. It succeeded because it reflected something genuinely felt by the community and it wasn’t just a message imported from elsewhere. "We’ve seen that even centuries-old traditions can find a second life on TikTok. Reflect local humour, pride, and storytelling styles rather than simply translating English-language assets," Shewakramani advises.
More than 47% trends fade within five days: The cost of being late and over-polished
Sapna Nemani, chief solutions officer, APAC at Publicis Groupe, addresses the costlier dimension of trend-chasing directly.
"When a brand catches a trend too late, after it has already peaked and begun to slow down, they risk appearing late to the party, or as though they don't understand the culture they are trying to engage with," Nemani says. The platform's pace, she argues, has outrun many brand teams' internal infrastructure: "Many brand teams are still not set up for the level of agility and trend-sensing capabilities required to move at the speed of TikTok."
She cites a leading FMCG client that pivoted to a social-first approach in 2025—not by jumping on every hashtag, but by building a creative system to identify early signs of persistence. "We apply agility only when a trend truly aligns with their brand values," she says.
There is also a production quality problem. Nemani says that over-polishing content kills the very thing that makes TikTok work. "Users can spot 'try-hard' content instantly. Pairing a serious or emotional topic with a tone-deaf product ad can cause long-term reputational damage that far outweighs any temporary spike in views." The watchword she uses is balance: "being culture-led rather than just creative-led."
The creator ROI conversation
ROI and measurement for creator content are perennial sticking points in CMO conversations. Nemani is candid about the scale of the structural problem. Traditional procurement frameworks were not built for platforms that move with the speed of culture.
"The dialogue is shifting from 'What does this single post cost?' to 'What is the cost of being ignored?'" she says. The alternative measurement model Publicis is advocating internally is what it calls ‘Earned Participation’ or the 60 to 150 days of community momentum that a well-designed, creator-led format template can generate. Standard impression and reach metrics, Nemani argues, do not capture this.
The practical implication is a shift in when and how brands involve creators. "The most sustainable trends emerge when creators and communities shape the format," she says. "We advise brands to involve creators in the ideation stage to co-develop flexible templates rather than enforcing a fixed, rigid storyboard."
The report frames this in terms of the four key dynamics identified by the GrowthOS analysis: persistence, virality, format adaptability, and creator co-creation. Trends co-created with creators, it finds, show measurably higher remix rates and longer persistence than brand-led launches.
Source: Campaign Asia-Pacific
