Brands Need to Know About These Announcements of the TikTok World Event

Key Points

• Improved features for the TikTok Creator Marketplace will allow brands to gain more insights on audience analysis, the performance of their influencer marketing campaigns and much more. These include :
• New search and referral features.
• Invite links.
• Gaming and comment anchors.
• Post campaign reporting.
• E-commerce new features: monetization options are to be improved with “Focus View” and cinema is to be made more interesting for the young audience with “Showtime Ads”.

The TikTok World event was primarily aimed at brands, as the Chinese company wanted to emphasize how valuable the app can be for brands whose target audience is Gen Z.

Read more about Gen Z’s influencer marketing, what makes the generation tick, what their interests are and how brands can best target them on the Kolsquare blog.

TikTok highlights the 73% of users that have a deeper connection to the brands they interact with on TikTok. Moreover, brands are 40% more likely to be remembered through TikTok compared to other platforms. With 15% of product discoveries on TikTok, the app is the fastest-growing channel in the world. Compared to NCS campaign performance, campaigns on TikTok deliver two times the return on ad spend (ROAS) on average.

How Brands are Using TikTok Marketplace to Their Advantage

TikTok recently released data from collaborative studies to motivate brands to advertise on the app and partner with TikTok creators.

• With Hotspex, TikTok found that 71% of users would buy products from a brand, if they were authentically recommended by creators.
• With Kantar, TikTok found that influencer marketing on their platform can significantly increase the brand value and double the engagement rates and dwell times.

Having been criticized many times for their lack of inadequate content monetization options for influencers, TikTok is working to “develop solutions that bring creativity into the ecosystem and make it easier for brands and creators to collaborate.”

The TikTok Creator Marketplace (TTCM) is the official branded content collaboration platform on TikTok, connecting brands and agencies with over 800,000 qualified creators around the world. The following updates to TTCM enable brands to find creators more efficiently, activate creators at a scale plus, measure and optimize the campaign performance.

These are the most important updates for TTCM:

• The search function and the integration of campaign insights have been improved, according to which it is now easier to find influencers on the app for the next influencer marketing campaign.
• The new recommendation function “TTCM Match” suggests to brands an automatically generated list of creators according to its wishes within a maximum of ten seconds.
• In the US, UK, Canada and Australia, brands can invite creators to collaborate. They publish an invitation on TTCM that contains all the details about the campaign, to which creators can proactively apply.
• Through Invite Links, brands and agencies can collaborate with any desired creator over the age of 18, even if they are not registered with TTCM. Invite links also give brands and agencies access to TTCM features such as, real-time campaign reporting and performance tools (anchors).
• Now, when creators partner with mobile game providers, they can  add links to download games from the iOS or Android app store through the Gaming Anchor.
• The Comment Anchor allows clickable links with more information about their partner’s product or services to be added and pinned at the top of their video comments.
• Overall, post-campaign reporting improvements as brands get even more data for branded contents. This includes audience details, such as overlap or distribution of audience interests. In addition, TTCM informs brands about Spark Ads campaign data and provides them with better analysis of the campaign performance and video audiences.

The TikTok World Event: New Features for Brands

TikTok has announced some brand-specific news on the app, including tips, insights and previews of new advertising features.

"Showtimes" Ads

The new feature called “Showtimes” Ad is mainly designed to help cinemas target the young audience and get them to go to the movie theaters again. The new ad unit allows users to choose movie showtimes and buy their local cinema tickets using the app.

The three key elements of the Showtimes feature are:

• Seamless User Experience: increasing clicks through a designated landing page and fast load times.
• Increased Showtime Lookups: selecting showtimes is easy and so is selling tickets. Interested parties are directly and conveniently redirected to check-out.
• Continuous optimization: Ads for moviegoers can be optimized, improving the cost per acquisition and the overall performance.

Promoting engagement with users through the following features:

• Full-length trailers.
• Automatically generated screening times based on the location of users.
• Connection to Ticketing Partners: Ticket purchases can be handled through partners such as AMC, Atom Tickets, Fandango, MovieTickets.com and Regal.

E-Commerce Push at the TikTok World Event

As part of the TikTok World Event, TikTok additionally announced some new features for the app’s targeted e-commerce. For example, the company is now setting up product fulfilment centres in the US.

In addition to the immediate benefits for theatre chains and movie studios, new norms for the buying behaviour in app will be established, to maximize the revenue potential and the monetization options for the developers.

The “Focused View” advertising goal aims to create a billing model for advertisers based on the attention and the engagement rates. TikTok explains, “Focused View is the next generation of our current Video View campaign goal in TikTok Ads Manager. With Focused View, brands only pay if users have voluntarily viewed the ad for at least 6 seconds or if they have interacted with the ad within the first 6 seconds (whichever comes first). This means, ads are shown to users who are truly paying attention and voluntarily interacting with the brand.”