How TikTok Changed Advertising Forever

How TikTok Changed Advertising Forever

Mondelēz International’s Nutter Butter went viral with a disturbing, surreal crime scene of smeared peanut butter and broken cookies. Language-learning app Duolingo‘s green owl twerked for millions of followers and flirted with pop star Dua Lipa. Mars pet food brand Sheba pitted cats against each other in a race to lick gravy. 

All of these marketing moments—more like “anti-marketing,” according to SS+K chief creative officer Stevie Archer—happened on TikTok, where experimental, entertaining, and sometimes absurdist content has found room to flourish.

The only way for brands to play in the space has been to have a point of view and ditch the old rules. 

Even as TikTok has now been banned in the U.S., ad industry leaders say that the style of marketing born on the platform isn’t just a flash in the pan. Whether or not TikTok lives on in the States, it has irrevocably changed how advertisers behave and how people expect brands to communicate with them. 

“We wouldn’t have seen this acceleration to experiment and take risks [among brands] without TikTok,” Thomas Walters, founder and Europe CEO of global influencer marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy, told ADWEEK. “That’s a permanent change.” 

TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, arrived in the U.S. in 2018 and exploded in popularity during the pandemic. Since the start of 2020, the percentage of U.S. adults who use TikTok several times per day has climbed from 4% to 20%, according to Morning Consult. Around 50% of the American population now uses the app.

TikTok hooked users with an endless swipe of short-form videos and a highly personalized algorithm, but it’s also “hard to understate the impact it’s had on creativity,” Walters said. The platform has democratized creativity by providing an accessible tool for people to produce content from anywhere and amass huge audiences. 

“It’s really empowered the creator economy, this idea that anybody can make brilliant content as long as you have a point of view and a phone,” said Matthew Henry, innovation lead at AMV BBDO.

Brands as entertainers

As the creator economy blossomed, breaking down the barriers to content creation and audience building, the traditional advertising model—whereby a brand pays to interrupt consumers with a message—continued to weaken. 

In the early days of social media, advertisers would “try to get their branding across in the first three seconds and almost trick consumers into thinking that what we were selling them wasn’t an ad,” Henry said. “Because of that, there was a huge amount of negative sentiment towards brands on social, and those that had followings were sort of screaming into a void.”