Marketing in the News - The New TikTok Ad Network

 

    I actually heard about this first from my mother before I read any news about it, since she's an avid TikTok user and shopper. I was interested in it because I don't actually know a lot about how she shops on there, and it sounded like the scope of it was expanding by a lot. Turns out, it is and it isn't.

    On October 5th, TikTok announced the expansion of their shopping experience and the addition of agentic commerce features--features powered by an AI that can complete complex and multi-step tasks to help users shop for more relevant and personalized products. They've also upgraded the TikTok Ad Network (TTAN), previously known as Pangle, so advertisers can extend ad campaigns on TikTok across almost 400,000 apps to users who are more likely to buy and more interested in what they're buying. They tout an impressive 63% greater Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) found during early testing, which I can confidently say would make any business major do a double take--that's massive. That can be the difference between if a small business sinks or swims, especially since TikTok is growing into such a platform for small creators to make money. And since they've been preaching about "empowering creators" for as long as I can remember, I think that's definitely still the direction they're surging towards for their Value Proposition.

    The biggest challenge to overcome for small business platforms like this is a balance between creator profit and platform profit. You can see this in how much eBay and Etsy take per sale--Etsy is can go up to 21.5% in certain situations and eBay can go up to 15% depending on the kind of product. That really hurts when you're just starting out! Meanwhile, sites like Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist offer more seller freedom but have a reputation for scams and untrustworthy listings. But TikTok doesn't have to deal with much of either side in this case; they offer quite a bit more in seller protection, but the amount of revenue they make from the platform itself is enough to prevent their fees from going higher than 11%. Apparently, the way to create a successful selling platform was right under our noses the whole time.

    The marketing campaign for this is interesting because you don't see very often a company advertising that they want YOU to advertise. My dad owns a small business of his own and I can see this as something that grabs his attention and finally convinces him to use social media for his company (with some persuasion from my mother, of course; he's very stubborn). However, besides the 15 second video at the top of the announcement, the introduction for this is boring. This is huge news for TikTok sellers, but since I'm not the target audience (people who use TikTok), it doesn't pop out in any way, especially with the technical jargon. Does the average person even understand what an ad network is? All the headlines on other sites talking about it feel similarly worded, so I can see how most people's eyes would glaze over and they scroll past the headline. For a platform of short-form content, it feels like a missed opportunity for word-of-mouth marketing. This also begs the question of if they even advertised it on TikTok itself--and if it was ever properly received by the target audience with how easily my 57 year old tech-illiterate mom can scroll past the built-in ads. 

    If you encounter the newsroom link for this announcement--which is not the sponsored result on Google, the boring one got that slot--they did a much better job with displaying their information in a digestible way for the average reader. Still heavy with buzzwords, but the intermittent bold text helps keep a reader's eyes moving and picking up the most important details in each paragraph, which is unfortunately useful when your whole business encourages short attention spans. Another thing for the short attention spans: videos that autoplay as you scroll and are automatically muted so you don't* startle yourself with sound that you can't find the source of. It's a great way to satisfy surface level curiosity and the overall wording on the site feels much closer to a 11th grade reading level; still includes long strings of three and four syllable words without feeling like my Chemistry textbook on a Friday night. 

Nevertheless, there's not much of a purple cow anywhere. I can see how this development might hook the "early adaptors" crowd, but again, I'm not the target audience. Which is weird to say because most TikTok advertising I've seen feels like they do a great job in appealing to all kinds of buyer personas, but this one was definitely targeted for people who understand the basics of business and business lingo. I think a flashier headline literally anywhere could have drawn a little more appeal. How about "We just Extended TikTok Shop across the Whole Internet"?

 

The biggest thing I learned with this assignment is definitely that way too many websites summarize too much and don't link to original announcements. Other than that, though, I learned that making a McDonalds out of a real estate business is not as hard as I originally thought, especially when a business has been leaning in a certain direction for a while. 

*Great effort on their part, but I did still end up blasting my eardrums out on a different site when I realized my cat sitting on the keyboard had maxed out the computer volume. My headphones were not happy about that one-way trip to the floor.