Background

As Sports and Gaming Partnerships Lead for Sub-Saharan Africa at TikTok, Janine led the Sports Partnerships team behind TECNO's activation of its Africa Cup of Nations 2023 sponsorship. TECNO, one of Africa's leading mobile phone brands, was an official AFCON sponsor, with the tournament played in Côte d'Ivoire in January and February 2024.

Challenge

TECNO needed to turn a standard sponsorship into real product adoption and brand awareness on TikTok, and to do it as a market entry tool in territories where TECNO had not yet launched. The brief called for a football challenge built with Effect House, TikTok's open augmented reality development community, produced in collaboration with the sports creator community Janine led.

Campaign

The team built the activation around an ambitious, participatory goal: break a Guinness World Records title with a custom AR football penalty game, turning a standard sponsorship into a shared, viral moment rather than a passive ad placement. An Effect House creator, selected by Janine's team and funded by TECNO, built the game itself, a hands-free, head-tracking penalty shootout against TECNO's brand mascot that let users play and upload in one motion.

As Creator Project Lead, Janine ran the cross-functional strategy across Sports Partnerships, Effect House, Ecosystem, Editorial, and PR & Communications, working directly with TECNO's brand team. She activated a cohort of creators from across Africa to seed early participation, pairing specialist Effect House talent with mainstream sports creators to pull in the wider TikTok user base. The effect was bound to the official #TECNOAFCON2023 hashtag for discoverability, with a single targeted push notification timed to mobilize the community ahead of the official attempt window.

Result

• 278 videos of people playing the AR mobile game were uploaded to TikTok within a single hour on 18 January 2024 in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, setting the Guinness World Record for Most videos of people playing an augmented reality (AR) mobile game uploaded to TikTok in one hour.
• The Sports and Gaming momentum built through activations like this contributed to TikTok introducing Sports Creator of the Year and Gaming Creator of the Year, its first dedicated Sports and Gaming categories, at the 2023 Top Creator Awards in Johannesburg.

Broader sports and gaming remit

The TECNO campaign sat within a wider body of sports partnership work. Janine's TikTok role also spanned Nigeria's gaming community, CAF and FIFA across the men's and women's Africa Cup of Nations and World Cups, and the African Union and Ghana's Ministry of Youth and Sports around the African Games 2024. She also produced All Roads Lead Down Under, a FIFA+ Original documentary series following national teams' qualification journeys to the 2023 Women's World Cup, including the 2022 Women's AFCON.

This experience now shapes how Arena & Atelier Co. advises clients on platform partnerships, creator activations, and market entry across sports, gaming, and the creator economy.