TikTok is doing everything it can to convince people that it’s an ecommerce platform.
First came TikTok Shop in 2023, and then came GMV Max, an automated ads solution to optimize ROI for TikTok Shop.
And now, TikTok is going “one step further,” Tao Baecklund, global head of content and services ads, told reporters during a media briefing in advance of the TikTok World event in New York City on Wednesday.
The timing is interesting. While broadcasters are going nuts pitching their programming and ad products during upfronts this week, TikTok is making a pitch of its own: We’re a one-stop shop.
This week, TikTok launched TikTok GO, which allows users to book travel, lodgings and activities directly through their feed – in other words, it just got a little too easy to impulse-buy plane tickets – and announced new advertising solutions to increase brand visibility and speed up the process from discovery to purchase.
Influencer-maxxing
But making TikTok more shoppable means asking creators to do more selling – and that requires a steady stream of content.
Although brands and agencies were already able to connect with creators through TikTok’s unified platform, TikTok One, creators don’t have the tools, resources or time to generate hundreds of videos a day.
TikTok’s new tool, Branded Buzz, offers a way to help advertisers collaborate with creators on “huge, organic campaigns” at scale, said Dina Liu, the company’s global head of brand product marketing. Advertisers can put out a bat signal with specific campaign parameters and brand guidelines, and any TikTok One creator can submit a video in response, allowing advertisers to find and work with multiple creators at once.
Branded Buzz goes hand in hand with Search Hubs, another new launch that places sponsored brand pages at the top of a user’s search results. It’s sort of like a sponsored homepage for a brand, featuring branded graphics, campaign narratives and creator content.
The idea, said Liu, is for an advertiser to get their campaign in front of consumers “at that very moment that they’re ready to discover, learn or shop.”
Slop or not?
Finding “that very moment” at scale is where AI comes in.
Last year, TikTok launched its AI-powered automation solution, Smart+ Campaigns, which handles the full campaign cycle from development to delivery, including audience targeting and data unification.
On Wednesday, it announced new AI-powered solutions to help marketers address “fragmented and data-heavy” workflows, said Jose Villalobos, TikTok’s global head of product marketing for platform and core ads.
The first solution, called Asset Manager, brings together a marketer’s product catalog, data connections and creative into a unified hub. Having assets in one place, according to Villalobos, simplifies campaign prep so a marketer can “go from setup to execution in seconds.”
But speedy execution gets you nowhere if a campaign doesn’t drive results.
TikTok hopes to preempt performance concerns with its other two AI launches: Auto Selection, a workflow that compiles all of a brand’s creative and optimizes performance for specific audiences, and Summary, which builds on the optimization of Auto Selection by evaluating a campaign’s performance data and generating specific insights and suggested changes.
TikTok Ads is also introducing its own Model Context Protocol so marketers can connect their AI systems to the platform to “plan, launch and optimize campaigns without manual intervention,” said Villalobos.
TikTok is also introducing creative AI tools, including an integration with Dreamina Seedance 2.0, ByteDance’s video generation model. The model supposedly creates “consistent, high-quality video at scale without the manual fixes that typically slow down production,” per Villalobos.
AI video generation that doesn’t require any manual fixes is a big promise – and also raises a very awkward question.
Namely, what happens to creators once video creation no longer demands a human touch?
