TikTok after the legal fight and why it’s coming for Meta’s ad dollars

Since its legal woes have been resolved, and the U.S. app was spun out earlier this year, TikTok has taken a muted approach to business. The platform is aggressively pushing for ad dollars from independent agencies and seemingly aiming to close the gap between it and Meta. What looks like business as usual on the surface is more likened to hushed plight for more ad dollars, creators and users.

“They can really just double down and focus on just what they’re trying to do, which is get ad dollars and creators and build up their user base rather than having this whole massive gray cloud over them that never seemed to go away until January,” said Krystal Scanlon, senior platforms reporter at Digiday.

Scanlon joined the Digiday Podcast for a TikTok check in and discuss the platform’s return to business, why TikTok isn’t out of the woods yet and what its AI tools say about its ad ambitions.

Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity.

Going after independent agencies and Meta budgets

The one thing that is definitely more interesting this year is from certain conversations I have had, it’s become clear that TikTok is no longer just doing that scattergram, just going after any old dollars anymore from anywhere that they can possibly get — which in some respects, makes sense. They don’t have to anymore prove the fact that they have a right to be in the U.S., they want to be in the U.S., and there’s a good reason for them to be in the U.S. But now they are definitely wanting to make sure that they go after independent agencies and they are assigning reps to them based on their Meta-billings, rather than their TikTok billings, which seems quite interesting.

Moving the masses

They can see who their competitors are and where they need to actually take the money from. They probably see themselves very much as a tier-one platform. It’s a matter of time of when they’ll get there as opposed to if they’ll get there. The only thing that’s holding them back is that it’s very hard in this industry when — certain platforms that are very dominant and very reliable — it’s very hard to get the masses to move from those platforms. Because why would you give it up for something that you can’t guarantee? That’s the issue that they’re probably coming up against right now.

The gap between TikTok’s Smart+ and Meta’s Advantage+

It’s closing, but it hasn’t closed. I don’t know how long that will necessarily take. Because that would require people to literally bring their dollars away from Advantage+ to see if they can match it potentially. That’s definitely the struggle. Because in one respect, you’ve obviously got Advantage+ on Meta. But as much as it delivers, I literally don’t have a single conversation where people don’t tell me about how irritating it is to have the entire platform have so many bugs. You’d think something like that becomes so annoying over time that it would deter people from using the platform. But it’s almost just become part of the course of using Advantage+. TikTok is probably fortunate in that it hasn’t got the bugs, but also it’s a much newer platform. What probably is going in their favor is they managed to build it to the scale in far less time than Meta’s.