Not unlike last year, the mood during TikTok’s NewFronts presentation last week felt like cautious optimism, if not outright relief.
Back in May 2025, TikTok was on its second deadline extension after narrowly escaping a full US ban. It continued operating under the assumption that it would remain open for business, but there was still a question mark.
This year, circumstances are very different. As of January, the US app is under the purview of the newly formed TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, complete with a new CEO in TikTok alum Adam Presser.
When Presser joined Khartoon Weiss, TikTok’s VP of global business solutions, on stage at the Ziegfeld Ballroom last week, it had only been 60 days since the new joint venture was established. But members of TikTok’s product team told AdExchanger that the company’s newly announced features and ad formats were in development far longer than that.
“Like Khartoon said, this is the acceleration moment,” said Dina Liu, TikTok’s global head of brand product marketing. “From the product standpoint, if anything, it’s been, like, ‘Go, go, go!’”
Not ready for programmatic prime time?
The new logo takeover, for example, will allow brands to literally replace the TikTok logo with their own when users open the app. According to Keiko Mori, head of creative product marketing and ops for North America, this format was in consideration for several years and took over a year to develop before testing began in early 2026.
Much of that testing included making sure there would be no negative effect on brand perception among TikTok users, Mori said, both with regard to TikTok itself and its brand partners.
“We cannot just put any ad campaign there, because it’s the first perception that the user is going to have with our app,” she said. Put another way, the format is not available to buy on a programmatic basis.
And neither is Prime Time, another new format that delivers three different ads to users from a single brand within a 15-minute time window. The idea is that brands can use the format for sequential narrative storytelling during a period of high visibility, making the campaign stickier for users.
Unsurprisingly, the TikTok product team is hesitant to let brands reserve Prime Time spots without checking their ads first.
“The ads cannot be the same,” said Liu, citing concerns about overfrequency and repetitiveness. “There is a higher expectation of quality, and the creative should be rendered differently each time.”
The importance of keeping everybody happy
The last announcement TikTok made during NewFronts isn’t an ad format but, rather, a series of updates to its Pulse suite, which was launched in 2022 and runs ads against the top 4% of videos on the platform. The new tools, Pulse Mentions and Pulse Tastemakers, allow advertisers to align with more immediate trending topics and certain eligible creators.
The focus on contextual tools is intentional, said Liu.
Instead of targeting very specific audiences, brands can tap into the Pulse suite to buy based on content categories, which is a way of “doing contextual adjacency without it feeling creepy,” she said. It’s a smart strategy, particularly given recent concerns over the TikTok US Joint Venture’s recently updated privacy policy, which now collects information about a user’s precise locations and expands the company’s off-platform ad network further.
The product team designs tools not just for advertisers, Mori said, but with users and creators in mind.
As Liu put it: “Forget the ads, right? Forget just the monetization component. If we can’t keep the user experience healthy, then nothing else matters.”
