Cute TikTok video? It’s an ad.
Major brands are flocking to the platform with its audience of more than 1 billion users
Ever since young Americans began their exodus from commercial television to streaming services and social media, advertisers have searched for the digital equivalent of home shopping channels, a place online where users might engage with ads rather than just quickly clicking past them.
Now, they think they are closer to finding this holy grail of marketing and it doesn’t look anything like QVC.
Welcome to the holiday shopping season on TikTok, where retailers are present like never before, their authentic-seeming advertisements dropped in between dances, confessionals and makeovers.
Young men and women showcase shimmering American Eagle tops as pulsating music plays in videos designed to look as if they were filmed in the 1990s. A woman in a unicorn onesie retrieves a specific brand of cookies at Target to the tune of “Jingle Bell Rock.” A home chef mixes and bakes cinnamon-apple cakes from Walmart in 30 seconds, displaying a bag from the retailer.
This kind of advertising presence would have been unfathomable for retailers last year, when President Donald Trump was threatening to ban TikTok because of its Chinese parent company and marketers were still struggling to figure out how to best reach the platform’s users. But President Joe Biden revoked the executive order in June, and TikTok crossed 1 billion monthly users in September. As a result, a regular stream of products, from leggings to carpet cleaners, have gone viral on the platform this year, often accompanied by the hashtag #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt, which has been viewed more than 7 billion times.
TikTok has been working to make the platform more lucrative for marketers and the creators they work with. And TikTok’s popularity with Generation Z and millennials, who are lured by its addictive algorithm and its setup as an entertainment destination versus a social network, has made the appeal undeniable for retailers.
Since August, at least 18 public retail brands, in apparel, footwear, makeup and accessories, have referred to their efforts on TikTok on calls with analysts and investors. Competitors have also taken notice. Instagram
has developed a TikTok-like feature called Reels and has been working to lure creators.
One of those benefiting is Maddison Peel, a 22-year-old in Hebron, Kentucky, who posts cooking videos to her account with more than 300,000 followers. She gained a large following this year after a clip she made featuring a roasted chicken and a Cardi B song took off.
Since then, she has worked with brands and retailers like Heinz, Kroger and Walmart, earning $5,000 to $10,000 a month. The payments enabled her to quit her job at McDonald’s, where she had been earning “not even $1,000 every two weeks,” she said.
Anna Layza, 31, of Melbourne, has more than 1 million followers on TikTok, and recently posted an ad that involved wearing a unicorn onesie and retrieving a box of cookies at Target. But she said she had mostly been posting on Reels these days, which recently started paying her for views on many videos.
“TikTok doesn’t pay you to post unless you have a brand that wants to be in the video,” Layza said. “But Instagram is actually paying you and giving you a bonus when you reach a certain amount of views.”