Author: Jazmin Brooks

By Michael Bürgi, Published by DigiDay

It’s hard to dispute that TikTok is currently the hottest social platform given its massive user base is on track to be about 750 million by year’s end, according to eMarketer (TikTok said its base is more like 1 billion).

But there are do’s and don’ts marketers (and the agencies that build and execute their campaigns) must pay close attention to, if they want to break through to the hordes of TikTokers sucked into its algorithmic maw of endless content.

Magna, the research and buying arm of IPG Mediabrands, sought to dig a bit deeper into what resonates, looking specifically at native advertising on TikTok, as well as ads repurposed from broader marketing campaigns on other platforms or media. The study, called “Understanding the Strengths of TikTok Ads,” was shared with Digiday in advance of its public release today.

Working with TikTok’s research team, Kara Manatt, evp and managing director of intelligence solutions at Magna, said the first “hard and fast rule” learned is that any repurposed ad needs to be converted to a vertical presentation, even if it requires redoing the creative.
“There was a huge difference in the performance of the same ad, depending on whether it was vertical or horizontal,” noted Manatt. Vertical ad recall hit 44 percent, whereas horizontal recall was 35 percent. More importantly, the study showed, purchase intent for vertical ads reached 8 percent, while horizontal achieved 3 percent. “That’s a very desirable impact on a metric like purchase intent,” she said.

Manatt pointed out that in many cases, marketers will need to factor verticality into the broader campaign because sometimes converting horizontal ads to vertical made them look “weird,” as she put it.
Generally, native ads performed better because they flowed more organically with TikTok’s user-created or creator-created content, added Manatt. Using beauty and entertainment clients she declined to identify out of client confidentiality, respondents to the survey found native ads “felt more like content,” she said. TikTok did not respond to requests for comment on the study.
Given its appeal to advertisers, how much is too much, even when it comes to native ads on TikTok? After all, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter have gotten heat from their user bases about being overly cluttered with ads.

“There’s been a lot of discourse around how social experiences for users are feeling either really saturated or disrupted by ads,” acknowledged Sadie Miller, svp of social media strategy and partnerships at Magna sibling Reprise. “One of the things TikTok has a step ahead in, is that a lot of the ads that show up on the platform don’t feel like ads off the bat. [For example,] the virality of hashtag challenges — asking users to participate in a brand message — had never been done before. In essence, every participant was part of an ad campaign, even if it didn’t feel that way to them.”

Miller said TikTok’s appeal goes beyond just young audiences, and can help to connect with new audiences. It’s a major part of the consideration when launching social campaigns, having graduated from testing the waters last year.

“A lot of our brands spent 2021 testing it out,” said Miller. “Now we’ve established a great rhythm with brands on how to show up on the platform, which was one of the bigger hurdles” before, when brands used one creative platform to feed multiple social efforts.

Manatt went even further to point out that “anybody who’s really focused on new acquisition should lean into the native format, specifically…Native has the unique ability to cast a wider audience net, because it looks and feels like content. That’s exactly what we found with video completion — that people who have never purchased the brand before who are potential new customers, were more likely to watch the video with native versus repurposed.”

The study’s final learning, as Manatt saw it, was that brands that use TikTok in a native capacity have to prioritize the organic feel of whichever creator they are working through, and focus less on production quality. In other words, authenticity wins. “Brands have a tendency to want to make the creator do this high production thing that doesn’t even fit in with what their norm is right,” she said.

Read the Full Study

Read the Article in Digiday

By Brian Steinberg, Published by Variety

Running traditional ads on streaming services like Disney+, Netflix and Amazon can be difficult. Some advertisers may choose a different route by creating some of the programming those broadband services use to get people to subscribe in the first place.
A new study from Interpublic Group’s Magna media-research unit and Amazon Ads found that consumers don’t seem overly concerned whether a TV show they watch is created by an advertiser or a more traditional production studio, so long as the content is entertaining. When asked why they chose to watch brand-funded entertainment, 59% of respondents said they found the show “fun to watch” while 45% “enjoyed the content” and 34% “‘earned something new.”
“It’s just like any other content,” says Kara Manatt, executive vice president of intelligence solutions at Magna, in an interview. “People watch it when it’s entertaining, and if it’s not entertaining, they won’t watch it.”

The findings may lend new hope to Madison Avenue, which finds itself with one of its main avenues of promotion — TV advertising — reaching fewer people, while many streaming services run significantly fewer ads, and, in many cases, none at all. Even those premium services that have started to run commercials — NBCUniversal’s Peacock and Warner Bros. Discovery’s HBO Max among them — only stream a few minutes’ worth per hour, fearful of antagonizing consumers who move to streaming to escape the commercial interruptions that are a bedrock piece of the economic architecture of traditional TV.
Some marketers have already found a path to streaming venues. In February, tech player HP Inc. released “Unlocked,” a “mini-movie” made for Peacock that was centered around a team of data scientists trying to unlock great mysteries of the world. Nike helped produce “The Day Sports Stood Still,” a film about the effect of the coronavirus pandemic on sports, for HBO and HBO Max that debuted last year.
When people discovered a marketer was involved in the creation of a program that proved entertaining, “most people said it improved their opinion of the brand or the TV show,” says Manatt. “That’s something that really surprised us.”

Advertisers aren’t just discovering the power of making their own content now. Madison Avenue has been at this for a while. PepsiCo in 2021 worked with Fox to craft a game show, “Cherries Wild,” and wove a plotline into the Fox drama “Empire” in 2015 that extended from an episode of the show into one of its commercial breaks. KFC recently created a short vignette that told a soapy story about Col. Harland Sanders — in the vein of a Lifetime movie (the ad aired on Lifetime).
The difference? On TV, many of these extravagant pitches appear during commercial breaks, or have to be carefully placed in a show so as not to interrupt the viewing experience. The streaming programs that advertisers create stand as choices alongside other dramas, series and specials.
“You can’t think about it as a brand. You just have to think about it as entertainment that happens to be financed by a brand,” says Brendan Gaul, , global chief content officer of Mediabrands, the media division of Interpublic Group.

According to the study, viewers prefer the brand-funded content to traditional commercials. are accepting of brand-funded entertainment vs. traditional commercials. And they indicated the advertiser-built programs spurred them to shop for the products related to them. More than half said they felt frustration when trying to purchase a product seen in a TV show, opening an avenue for advertisers to consider better ways to pair e-commerce options with streaming projects. NBCUniversal has already dipped its toes in these waters, and it’s easy to see why Amazon, a backer of the study, would be interested in such technology as well.

Read the Full Study

Read the Article in Variety