At a talk on Monday in Cannes, Blake Changless, TikTok’s president of global business solutions, said that hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses buy ads on the platform. “We want millions,” he added.
Every platform wants millions of advertisers, especially since Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, boasts of more than 10 million advertisers.
At Cannes, TikTok executives opened the first day of the advertising festival at the festival headquarters in a discrete event space across from the Palais, the main center of action for the conference. They discussed the tools that the platform is putting in place, such as live shopping, building brand safety and technology amidst challenges, and the impact of Apple’s privacy rules on the whole ad ecosystem and the creator economy. On a lighter note, Ray Cao, TikTok’s managing director and global head of monetization product, strategy and operation, touched upon the challenges of losing his luggage upon arriving in Nice, France.
They discussed content and its importance in contextual targeting. “A lot of people are thinking about contextual targeting, especially for an in-feed environment like TikTok,” Cao said.
“A lot of people are thinking about contextual targeting, especially for an in-feed environment like TikTok,” Cao said.
Safety considerations also came up where Chandlee discussed how TikTok is developing ad products to keep brands comfortable with their service. The company also made an announcement on third-party tools that measure suitability and provide a few ad controls through companies like OpenSlate, Zefr and Integral Ad Science. “When we review content it’s not just the images,” said Francis Stones, TikTok’s head of European brand safety. “It’s the sounds. It’s the text. It’s emojis, comments.”
About Apple’s policy, Chandlee said, “The iOS 14 changes that were made last year had a huge impact on the industry, Chandlee said. “The industry built on data and knowledge and optimization against that data.” He added, “The industry had to come back a little bit to contextual,” Chandlee said, which we think is a very, very powerful way to approach and advertise and communicate with audiences.”
On the platform’s impact on live shopping, Sofia Hernandez, global head of business marketing for TikTok said, “We caused a national feta cheese shortage,” Hernandez said, referring to the baked feta pasta trend on TikTok. “Those of us who have been marketers for years know that you don’t shoot food that way, it’s always highly styled,” she added.