TikTok recreates its ads for billboards through Vistar partnership

“When agencies or brands are creating really compelling campaigns on platform, they are vertical. We need great partners to be able to reformat and reimagine these TikTok ads for screens of all different shapes and sizes,” said TikTok’s global head of media and licensing partnerships, Dan Page, adding that the platform only works with a “handful” of partners for “out-of-phone” — TikTok’s play on out-of-home.

Rather than a simple copy-and-paste version of a TikTok ad appearing on a big screen, brands use Vistar’s in-house creative studio, to explore how to recreate their app ads in different environments, such as horizontal screens, using static screens, or showing user interactions.

“The team explores with the advertisers to try things that haven’t been done yet,” Vistar’s svp and gm of U.S. marketplace, Lucy Markowitz said. “There’s a lot more flexibility than just fitting into a set of requirements — whether that’s using the logo, adding borders, or incorporating interactions like likes and comments to make the creative more compelling.”

That creative flexibility still has to adhere to TikTok’s strict controls around how its intellectual property and brand assets can be used outside the platform. 

“Through collaboration internally, we got approval for this to be one of very few places where the TikTok brand can appear side by side to a brand, but that is mainly to give attribution to the creator,” said Page. “Everything that goes up is approved, and brand friendly, and anyone who appears on the screen has cleared it.”

To access the offering, TikTok advertisers already need to have a campaign running in the app as “it’s really predicated on extending something that already exists there,” said Markowitz, who added that it must “meet a certain minimum threshold” to be considered, though she didn’t share what those thresholds are.

Neither company shared specifics on what financial splits they’re taking from the ad sales, but the offering remains a managed service for the time being.

“It’s a managed service because of the creative elements because most billboards are sound off, but on platform we’re sound on, so we want to give a level of service to this,” said Page. “We’re always looking at different ways to evolve, and there might be automated ways that smaller self-service and managed accounts can activate these screens at any point in time.”

Markowitz said that campaign performance can be tracked using standard DOOH measurement providers, while TikTok will provide brand lift studies and on-platform performance metrics too.

The partnership is the latest development in TikTok’s out-of-phone program which launched in 2023. Since then, the platform has worked with a number of partners including Adomni, Screenvision, Vevo and Loop TV, spanning cinemas, billboards and digital screen networks, but maintains that execution is deliberately limited to a “handful” of partners, according to Page.

TikTok’s partnership with Vistar Media started back in late 2024 — a period marked by the ongoing uncertainty about the platform’s U.S. status, which saw some advertisers take a more cautious approach to spending on the platform until a more certain future was guaranteed. The platform spent 2025 fighting the case to remain in the country, while President Trump issued four extensions in order to secure the deal with China, which ultimately came to a close in January.