Last week, the Jonas Brothers dropped their sixth studio album (and second since reuniting), titled The Album. While the JoBros are beloved by the Millennials who grew up with them, they leveraged TikTok to win over the hearts, minds, and ears of Gen Z. Today we’ll break down the three pillars of their TikTok strategy — collabs, owned channel activations, and a paid campaign.

Collabs

In April, the Jonas Brothers started appearing everywhere on the fyp. Their team seemingly invited dozens of Creators to come capture content with them, in exchange for promoting their new single “Waffle House.” While artist collabs with Creators is nothing particularly new, the Jonas approach seems different because:

1. They collaborated with newer, rising star creators in addition to established faces on the app: Dare we wonder if their PR team was using Trendpop? The Jonases collaborated with fresh, exciting new creators like Jake Shane (whose following is up 3,348% since February) and Brookie and Jessie (up 38% this year). 

2. Content was tailored to the specific Creator partners: While the Jonas Brothers did have a templatized lip sync TikTok they recorded with most creator partners (more on this in a bit), they often recorded content specifically tailored to meet the Creators' normal style (e.g. a funny skit with comedy creators, a dance with dance creators, etc). 

‍3. They made A LOT of content with each Creator: While they did only do 1x video with some Creators, they filmed an entire series of videos with creators like Chris Olsen and Jake Shane

This approach yielded organic-feeling content that felt native to the Creators’ feeds, making the Jonas Brothers seem like their new bestie instead of an artist they’re promoting.

Owned content

Being successful on TikTok starts with your own channel and The Jonas Brothers’ account rises to the occasion. While they have the obligatory music video clips and TikToks promoting their own album, they also lean into trending audios/formats as well as behind-the-scenes clips to keep fans engaged and excited.

‍The @JonasBrothers account has:

📲 7.2M followers

👋 9% engagement rate

👀 1.5M views per video

💙 45K likes per video

👯‍♀️ 68% female/32% male following

📊 74% Gen Z, 25% Millennial, 1% Gen X/Boomer following

If the Jonas Brothers account is good, Joe Jonas’s TikTok is god tier. While the other brothers are also active on TikTok, Joe’s account stands out since it genuinely seems like he is running is account and has fun doing it. His account may be so successful because he reaps the benefits of being both a celeb and a creator. His page has a unique mix of TikTok native tropes like “morning in my life” and “get ready with me” content intermixed with videos trolling his famous brothers or TikToks with his wife, actress Sophie Turner.

‍@JoeJonas' Stats:

📲 5.8M followers (he’s the most followed brother in front of Kevin at 1.7M and Nick at 5.6M)

👀 1.4M views per video

👋 10% engagement rate

💙 195K likes per video

👯‍♀️ 69% female/31% male following

📊 69% Gen Z, 30% Millennial, 1% Gen X/Boomer following

‍Paid campaign

To generate extra buzz for their album and the single “Waffle House,” the Jonas Brothers leveraged a paid campaign with CapCut. They did this by:

1. Laying the groundwork: In a bunch of collab videos with Creators, the Jonas Brothers filmed a very specific lip sync, where the boys would pop in and out of frame to the lyrics of Waffle House

‍2. Building a CapCut template: They then launched a CapCut template where users could virtually add the Jonas Brothers in to pop in and out of their shot

‍3. Getting the word out: After launching the template on the Jonas Brothers account, their team then contracted Creators to post using the CapCut template and song, sharing how fun it is

With over 15K uses so far (according to CapCut), the campaign certainly gained traction with fans who weren’t able to film with the Jonas Brothers IRL.

‍So did it work? Is The Album the next big thing on TikTok?

Yes…and maybe?

The Jonas Brothers definitely succeeded in driving massive awareness and views for their new album. “Waffle House” now has 184M views, 15.2M likes, and an 8% engagement rate on the platform. Views on #jonasbrothers are up by 1B (43%) since the start of the year.

Where they’re currently behind is UGC. “Waffle House” has more UGC than any other track from The Album but is at 17.3K videos (for comparison, most songs we cover as “viral” in this newsletter have at least 250K videos and growing rapidly). 

That said, a slower start doesn’t mean the album will never take off on the app, and UGC with Waffle House is steadily growing at about 30% per week.