How TikTok will lean into culture, commerce and livestreams
The Media Leader interview
TikTok has seemingly gone from strength to strength, propelled by changing behaviours during the pandemic. Two of the Bytedance company’s leading execs, Stuart Flint and Trevor Johnson, tell The Media Leader what’s next.
Eye-opening stats come with the TikTok territory these days: it has now hit a billion users globally and its number of creators has grown from 50,000 to half a million since the end of 2021.
And yet the company’s head of global business solutions, Europe, Stuart Flint does not seem all that satisfied.
“There’s still a big education job for us to do as a relatively new entrant to to the market,” Flint tells The Media Leader: “And, certainly from where we’ve been in the last few years, we’ve seen brands of all sizes and sectors start to find some really good success on the platform. This was perfectly positioned for us in terms of our full sound formats and full screening format on the mobile phone.”
TikTok is certainly not that ‘new’ any longer. Last week, the company held its first event at Cannes Lions, the world’s biggest advertising trade festival. In the UK, Ofcom’s Online Nations Report 2022 found TikTok’s total adult reach in September 2021 was 15.4 million, its online adult reach in the same month was 31% and its average daily adult audience in September 2021 was 5.4 million.
The same report discovered that UK adult TikTok visitors spent 29 minutes per day on the platform in February 2022, with 15-24-year-old visitors spending 56 minutes on TikTok per day.
Flint remarks: “No-one expected instant growth so fast, and so the last few years, the abundance of creativity we have seen from the likes of M&S to Gucci to Ellesse to ASOS right through to small businesses as well like Ivy & Twine and Only Curls when these small businesses have built themselves on TikTok and been highly successful is really wonderful.”
While the perception of the TikTok audience is young and Flint described it as “part of the Gen Z generation”, he revealed TikTok is currently seeing not only “a diversification” of its audience, but also the type of content on the platform.
These come in the form of trends like #cleantok, and #booktok, which according to data collected last month, garnered 40.5 billion views and 58.2 billion views respectively.
The latter was credited by the World Economic Forum as helping pushing sales of print books to an all-time high last year.
Trying to build ‘a very clear entertainment platform’
Consolidating its presence in entertainment, sport and music and tapping in to cultural moments is one strategy TikTok is eyeing this year, coming off the back of some high-profile sponsorships from the UEFA Women’s Euros, the Capital’s Jingle Bell Ball and SummerTime Ball, the Cannes Film Festival, Eurovision, and the Africa Cup of Nations.
It’s all about leaning into cultural moments, Flint explains: “It’s not about the event, not really. Those types of events are all about the fans. It’s all about the communities within those environments, and because of the really strong pillars and associations we have with music, and entertainment and us being a very clear entertainment platform, I think it is really exciting, so, to become official partners of things like Eurovision are not just about the event but more about the people within it.”
This involvement in cultural events leads to more opportunities for creators, “the lifeblood” of TikTok, according to Flint, before he cites a 26% uplift in brand consideration and 22% uplift in brand recommendations when brands put TikTok creators front and centre of their campaigns.
In terms of how this ties in to advertising and commerce tools, Flints highlights Branded Mission and TikTok Pulse as tools advertisers should pay attention to this year.
Branded Mission allows advertisers to crowdsource content from creators on TikTok, in turn allowing creators to monetise their top-performing videos from advertisers. TikTok Pulse is a range of contextual ad solutions (currently only available in the US, and planned for Europe by the end of 2022) where brands can place themselves in the top 4% of content in the “For You” feed, with 12 content verticals to choose from, as well as split revenue with creators with 100,000 or more followers.
Flint calls this “a fresh approach” to creator marketing and stresses the priority is developing strategic relationships with creators to help them partner with brands so that in the next six to 12 months TikTok can launch more specific ad formats to help promote work with creators in an “authentic way”.
This is a move that Flint dubs “a big future step” for TikTok which other platforms have “tried to crack” in the past without success. It’s a notable shift from last September, when Flint told The Media Leader that “dynamic showcase ads” — tools which enable advertisers to tailor the type of content within their ads — would be “the big one” amid a slew of ecommerce product launches last year.
More investment in livestreaming and ecommerce
Livestreaming events and shoppable ad formats will also be a focus for investment in the future, according to Johnson.
While TikTok is most well-known for its short-form videos, a format arguably copied by social media giants like Meta, Johnson tells The Media Leader: “Livestreaming continues to be a really big investment for us; being able to give creators an opportunity to tell their stories in short-form or a longer form in terms of livestreaming is going to be a really, really important part of our proposition.”
#TikTokmademebuyit has been a viral trend, and Johnson explains that when people open up TikTok, they do not know what they are going to get which opens up commerce opportunities.
He says: “Ecommerce is the intersection of entertainment and product discovery and purchase in the platform. People are receptive to commercial messages if they’re relevant, engaging, because that’s the discovery mindset they’re in. So community commerce is something that we’re heavily invested in in terms of allowing brands, advertisers, creators and people to have that commerce experience in our platform.”
Johnson points to shoppable ad products like Collection Ads, Dynamic Showcase Ads, enabling third parties like Shopify to build integrations into TikTok for small and medium sized businesses to create shoppable assets and TikTok’s own all-round TikTok shop, as examples of this commerce investment.
“It’s all allowing brands to sell directly through their TikTok accounts, but it’s also allowing creators to monetize our platform as well, “Johnson explains. “Creating monetization and allowing them to not only exist in our platform and create good content, but to be able to monetize themselves and potentially earn a living on the platform is really, really important. You’ll see lots of investments from us over the coming years in terms of ensuring that community commerce survives and thrives on a platform at a scale.”
In this vein, he highlights Ellesse doing the first “shoppable livestream gig” with Zara Larsson so fans could buy her outfit while she was on stage and a recent event involving JD Sports called Oi TikTok, which was a rap show hosted by TikTok creators with an added “Crep-Cam” filming people’s shoes and offering live ecommerce opportunities.
Johnson adds: “That’s just something which is taking an audience that we know likes that culture, wrapping a brand around it, and then allowing some sort of ecommerce activations to happen and it was just incredible that it was so seamless if you’ve got the right content, the right brands and the right culture all coming together.”
Flint calls these shoppable ecommerce opportunities “the tip of the iceberg” and these changing purchase behaviours, hugely accelerated by “the stimulating rockets” of people getting into tech during the Covid pandemic, are something we “have to get our head around”.
‘No finishing line’ for brand and consumer safety
Brand and consumer safety has always been a question around social media platforms which publish and share user-generated content, something the UK government’s Online Safety Bill is being “strengthened” to address.
Even though TikTok would rather call itself a digital entertainment platform, it has not escaped these questions. Flint stresses: “Brand safety is still number one priority for us and ensuring consumer safety is is our North Star, that’s what’s guiding us right now.”
He adds the most important priority is that the TikTok community is and feels safe and they want to be “leading the charge” in the industry on both brand and consumer safety that other companies can later emulate.
Flint explains there is “no finishing line” for safety measures to be introduced, and details how TikTok has been introducing a range of additional support and guardrails for all consumers which he believes to be “industry-leading safety measures”.
These include restricting access to livestreaming, direct messaging for minors and setting under-18 default privacy, and also from an educational point of view a guardians’ guide for parents and teachers giving them resources, tools and policies to help young people on the platform.
This care of minors on the platform, also feeds in to brand safety, and Flint added: “Enabling brands to feel comfortable is obviously very important, and making sure they feel confident in our environment is also critical, so we use a lot of third party trusted vendors, certainly from a brand safety metrics point of view, and we’re building our business partnerships and internal products to reflect and make sure that the industry is moving into this future teacher-safe environment.”
He also mentions the TikTok Inventory Filter which gives brands control over what content appears next to their ads using machine learning technology to ensure it is safe and suitable for the environment, and TikTok’s transparency report which it releases on a bi-monthly basis on how much content they take down and how their algorithm works.
Flint concludes: “We’re working on these things and introducing these things time and time again to make sure that we’re staying ahead of any any policy changes in the works in the environment, of course, and in the industry, but also making sure that we are first and foremost protecting users and the communities of their own privacy, but also making sure that it feels safe in these environments.”