Shakespeare, TikTok & Creative Fragmentation.
Newsletter #33 | Shakespeare, TikTok & Creative Fragmentation.
Discover ground-breaking research from Meta, Kantar, and CreativeX on the next set of creative effectiveness levers.
Leave it to Rory Sutherland to seamlessly combine the worlds of digital media and literature.
In a conversation with TikTok’s Sanna Britsman , he described the unique appeal of the platform. For Sutherland, TikTok serves as a “Wikipedia with video”, offering brands a unique opportunity to discover and engage with audiences they might not have previously anticipated.
Moving to conversation
TikTok also provides space for brands to demonstrate that they exist in the real world, responding to trends and engaging in comments sections. Advertising legend Jeremy Bullmore saw this engagement with reality as critical for brands who wanted to build trust with their consumers, arguing that a good advertiser should be interested in every section of the Sunday papers.
For Bullmore, digital platforms provided a perfect means for this type of engagement. Over a decade ago, he observed that ‘digital’ was a “curious word to have emerged as the name for a form of mass communication that gets closer to conversation than anything before it”.
The tide was shifting before TikTok’s inception, as Bullmore noted in 2011: “After a century during which corporations got bigger and bigger, more and more global, and almost inevitably more and more remote from their ultimate users, the trend has begun to turn.” However, the impact of the platform on brands, consumer behavior, and the advertising industry as a whole should not be underestimated.
A world without TikTok
This impact has come under renewed scrutiny as the platform faces a potential ban in the US. If the Supreme Court upholds its decision, app stores and internet providers will be forced to stop providing service to TikTok by January 19th. This means anyone who doesn’t have the app on their phone won’t be able to download it, and app updates would be prohibited, eventually making it unusable for existing users.
Even if ByteDance does agree to sell up to a US buyer, it’s highly unlikely that the algorithm that’s made TikTok so beloved to its over 170 million monthly US users would be included, rendering the app a hollow version of its former self.
As Jasmine Enberg commented to ADWEEK , “TikTok is really the last app that emerged and made its way to the mainstream and has stuck around. The loss of TikTok would cause major disruption to the digital landscape, having a ripple effect across media, marketing, and eCommerce.”
It’s a reminder that while the overwhelming trend in advertising has been towards globalization, there are limits. Multinational companies have consolidated and centralized their spending on key platforms, but national regulations would force a change in strategy.
Despite copycat features from competitors in the form of reels and shorts, advertisers would struggle to find the same audience and performance in the event of a ban. Nevertheless, media dollars are expected to primarily shift to Meta and YouTube, poised to capture 50% of any displaced TikTok dollars.
A new fragmentation
A TikTok ban would also be an interesting shift away from the trend towards increased fragmentation in media, with one less platform (at least for US advertisers). But as Tom Roach reminded us in his latest Marketing Week article, “It’s not only about a well-orchestrated media campaign, it’s about what you fill it with too.”
Brands are increasingly confronted with conflicting pathways to creative success. On the one hand, consistently repeating distinctive creative is key. On the other, platforms have a seemingly unending appetite for content, demanding new, varied work to keep audiences engaged.
A common strategy to navigate this tension has been to create a small number of core assets, which are then adapted for digital channels. This ignores research that demonstrates ads work best when built with a specific platform in mind.
Even when brands are attempting to keep up with platform demands for content, the black box between creative and media teams means that over half of core assets are never activated in markets. This translates to a $100 billion investment across the industry on unused creative ideas.
The result? “A creative fragmentation problem.” (To add to the media one).
A potential solution?
Roach’s proposed solution is to aim for “the best of all worlds”: high consistency, coupled with high volume, that is optimized for platform and placement. In this universe, brands adhere to clearly defined guidelines but can flex to accommodate different platforms. They employ the right people and technology to meet the high volume of content demanded by today’s algorithms but rally around a focused strategic idea. Crucially, they take into account the platforms they’re creating for.
More than any other platform TikTok has forced brands to rethink their content production methodology. As Britsman reminded us, despite how the industry might group it, TikTok was built as an entertainment platform, not a social media platform. This philosophy is evidenced in the brands and content that have achieved breakthrough TikTok success.
TikTok’s genesis marked a watershed moment in digital advertising, enabling true ‘virality’ that other platforms simply couldn’t compete with. It forced brands to rethink how they approached digital advertising, with huge rewards for those who struck the right chord.
The challenge of creative fragmentation will endure beyond any Supreme Court decision. Brands need to “generate the required quantity without sacrificing quality”, with a consistent thread across their content creating a cohesive impression for the end viewer. The challenge for the ‘TikTok native’ brands of the world will be replicating the success they enjoyed on the platform on other platforms without losing their audience along the way.
Thanks for reading!