Pitch deck: TikTok says its 27m users open the app 8 times a day in the US

By Digiday • February 26, 2019 •

TikTok, the short-form video app from Chinese tech company Bytedance, has been courting advertisers by focusing on its global reach and how much time its users spend on the app every day.

The company has been meeting with U.S. ad agencies in recent weeks to talk about its four ad products and discuss future offerings, such as biddable ads, as Adweek reported last week. Digiday received the pitch deck TikTok sent to U.S. agencies.

In the deck, TikTok compares itself to other social apps — specifically, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Reddit — by saying its average session duration is the longest at 294 seconds (4 minutes, 54 seconds), citing App Annie data from October 2018.

In the U.S., TikTok has 26.5 million monthly active users; 60 percent of them are 16 to 24 years old; 63 percent are female; and 52 percent are iPhone users, according to the deck, citing internal data from February 2019.

TikTok users, on average, open the app eight times per day and spend 46 minutes on the app per day. Those numbers are comparable to the app’s engagement in the U.K. and France, according to the pitch deck sent to European ad agencies in November.

TikTok’s four ad products are brand takeover (image, GIF or video that displays when users open the app), in-feed video (less than 15-second video ads in the homepage feed), hashtag challenge (brand-sponsored hashtags) and branded effect (2D animated lenses). The brand takeover ads cost $50,000 per day with a guaranteed 5 million impressions, according to a rate card seen by Digiday. In-feed ads are sold at $10 cost-per-impression with $6,000 minimum campaign spend. TikTok sells hashtag challenge as a six-day package at $150,000 flat rate for between 20 to 30 million impressions. Branded effects cost $100,000 and are developed by TikTok’s in-house creative team.

“TikTok’s pitch to advertisers is going to be more on the branding play than a conversion play — it’s very top-of-funnel,” said David Herrmann, director of advertising at Social Outlier. “It interests me because of its unique way to connect with people. If we’re just putting ad breaks in between swipes, I’m not interested. Snapchat and Instagram have proven that it’s difficult to scale that way. It’s all in the feeds of the platform, essentially how people interact natively that I’m intrigued by.”

TikTok did not respond to a request for comment by press time.