TikTok rebrands its advertiser pitch around full-funnel ambition

While the January deal removed the years-long uncertainty that had been hanging over the business, Hernandez said TikTok is now operating and speaking to the market as “one company,” with teams “talking to brands and agencies across the world as one TikTok.”

Rather than focusing on how brands should show up, TikTok is making the case for why it should command a larger share of marketing budgets – arguing that its “secret sauce” lies not just in attention, but in how users engage with brands in ways that ultimately drive business outcomes.

“I have no doubt we are moving into a tier one platform option in clients’ minds, and that’s why this campaign is so important,” Hernandez said. “We started working on this campaign earlier in 2025 and worked with agency Gravity Road to bring the message to life”, via a video ad. The campaign will run across multiple environments, including the refreshed TikTok for Business website, on-platform placements, social channels, TikTok’s Out-of-Phone network (OOH and digital OOH), global and regional events, and in-office activations.

It’s TikTok’s first business-facing campaign since its “Don’t make ads, make TikToks” push in 2021 – a delay that makes sense given the wider context. This time last year, the platform was still contending with the threat of a U.S. ban, so a campaign like this would likely have been overshadowed.

The earlier campaign, as Hernandez put it, was a “rallying cry to the industry, to let them know we’re here and we want brands to participate on our platform, differently than what they’d normally do when they make an ad.”

Now it’s about proving TikTok’s value as an active, discovery-driven platform – not a “passive experience”, as Hernandez put it – but making users want to connect with brands and buy from them, by turning attention into action.

“The industry is still thinking in this fragmented, upper and lower funnel media model, but we’ve proven that we unify discovery, storytelling and conversion in one environment,” Hernandez said. “So making sure the world knows we really move audiences to action, and we turn attention into action. That was the core here [with this campaign]. “It’s making sure we carve out our niche in this ecosystem.”

The emphasis on driving business outcomes reflects the more strategic approach that Digiday reported on earlier this week. TikTok is no longer using just wide-reaching, high-volume incentives to drive adoption of the platform. Instead, it’s aiming to capture a bigger share of brand and performance dollars from deeper advertiser partnerships.

The new ad formats and placements revealed at TikTok’s Newfront’s presentation on Tues. March 24, echoed this shift, giving TikTok more tools to back up its broader pitch to advertisers.

Those are:

• Logo Takeover: a premium ad format that enables advertisers to co-brand with TikTok on the logo launch page of the app
• Prime time: a sequential format, which enables brands to show a series of ads at specific times during tentpole moments, live events or high-engagement periods
• TopReach: combines the already existing TopView and TopFeed placements into a single buy

The new ad products are a clear play for big brands and their budgets, which is’t surprising given it’s been going after TV advertisers and experiences for some time, said Jasmine Enberg, co-founder and co-CEO of creator economy media company Scalable.

But for TikTok, success of this new official positioning will hinge on whether it can not only appeal to a broader swathe of advertisers, but also become a primary platform for both brand and performance dollars.

“TikTok is betting that its position in the zeitgeist will appeal to big advertisers, who increasingly want to be immersed in culture and events,” Enberg added. “It’s a good bet, but TikTok is also facing tough competition from YouTube, which is where a lot of TV advertiser attention is now.”