OBJECTIVE
Turning sports fandom into a conversation about mental health
Love, Your Mind is a national mental health campaign from the Ad Council that encourages people across the U.S. to be more open and proactive about their mental health.
For its latest effort, Love, Your Mind tapped into the cultural power of sports, bringing together professional athletes and powerful storytelling to encourage fans to check in on and prioritize their own mental well-being. With passionate sports communities already thriving on TikTok, the Ad Council partnered with the platform to meet fans exactly where they were watching, talking about, and connecting over the athletes and sports they love. The goal was to build awareness at scale while ultimately driving audiences to Love, Your Mind's free, expert-vetted mental health resources.
SOLUTION
Combining human storytelling with AI-powered performance
To bring the campaign to life, the Ad Council paired athlete-led creative with a full-funnel TikTok strategy designed to move audiences from discovery to action.
Creative featuring professional athletes including Bijan Robinson, A'ja Wilson and Tim Ream helped bring the campaign's mental health message into the sports conversations already happening on TikTok. The campaign also featured its anthemic "Celebrations" PSA and customized Carousel Ads, creating a dynamic mix of assets that could engage audiences in different ways throughout the funnel.
The campaign began with a Video Views objective to efficiently build reach and watch time. A Traffic layer then encouraged audiences to visit the Love, Your Mind website, while a Conversion campaign optimized toward landing-page visits. Custom Audience retargeting helped the Ad Council reconnect with people who had already been exposed to the campaign's video creative and move them further along the journey.
At the center of the strategy was Smart+, TikTok's AI-powered automated advertising solution. Smart+ automated key elements of campaign targeting and optimization, helping identify and reach audiences likely to engage with the campaign without requiring the team to manually define every audience input or continuously optimize delivery.
To understand the impact of this approach, the Ad Council ran Smart+ Traffic alongside a standard Traffic campaign with identical $125K budgets. Smart+ expansion was enabled to help discover additional relevant audiences, while three creative copy lines ran in parallel to provide further opportunities for optimization throughout the flight.
Beyond media performance, automation also made the campaign easier to manage. According to the Ad Council, Smart+ reduced the need to manually build multiple ad groups and units, cutting campaign setup time roughly in half. That meant the team could spend less time on campaign mechanics and more time focused on the human story at the center of the work.
RESULTS
Reaching more people while driving meaningful action
The combination of athlete-led storytelling and AI-powered optimization helped Love, Your Mind efficiently scale its message and connect more people with mental health resources.
According to Ad Council campaign performance data, Smart+ delivered 61% more impressions and 45.2% more clicks than standard Traffic on identical $125K budgets, while achieving a 38% lower CPM and reducing CPC from $0.26 to $0.18. Smart+ also delivered roughly twice the reach of standard delivery and accounted for approximately 95% of all site sessions generated during the flight.
Across the full campaign, Love, Your Mind generated 128.1 million impressions, 1.74 million clicks and more than 944,000 landing-page conversions. Carousel Ads were particularly effective at driving action, accounting for 96% of landing-page conversions.
Smart+ let us spend less time building and managing, and more time on the work that matters — it cut our setup roughly in half and still reached the right people. Across the flight it drove the vast majority of our site traffic, helping connect the audience to Love, Your Mind resources for their mental well-being.
This is a TikTok case study and is solely for informational purposes. Past performance does not guarantee or predict future performance. All claims related to brand products including, without limitation, the effectiveness, sales, or quality of such products are brand-reported and not endorsed or verified by TikTok.