TikTok's Save Small Businesses in Thailand

COVID-19 restrictions were closing Thai restaurants at scale, with at least 50,000 closures in Bangkok alone and around 500,000 workers out of jobs, and no government strategy was outlined to help. Delivery-app advertising was too costly for the small restaurants that needed exposure most. Vero's research into Thais aged 18 to 35 pointed to a way through: this audience was eager to help others, each had a favourite local store or restaurant, and many held a strong personal bond with those businesses.

Working with TikTok, Vero built Save Small Businesses as a participative movement rather than a paid push, positioning the platform as a force for the greater good that could give local restaurants more visibility. The campaign activated both active and lapsed TikTok users, and made geography and geolocalization the competitive element so that support felt local and personal while still scaling nationwide. Food was TikTok's focus area for the second half of the year, and the mechanic channelled existing user goodwill toward the restaurants people already loved.

Anchoring the idea in an existing motivation gave users a personal reason to take part instead of relying on reach, and casting TikTok as a civic actor during a crisis gave the platform a credible role. The work ran entirely in-platform on TikTok, where Vero reports more than 4.7 million impressions, 100K sticker views and 1.5 billion views on hashtag videos. These figures come from Vero's own case-study page, with no independent verification, and business outcomes for the restaurants themselves were not disclosed in available sources.