TikTok ban looms closer, leaving more questions than answers in its wake

Back in January, TikTok was temporarily banned in the U.S. before President Trump signed an executive order extending the ban deadline for 75 days, marking April 5 as the new deadline (T-Day, if you will) for ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, to divest from the company. 

Since then, Trump has said his administration is working with parties interested in purchasing TikTok, but it’s still unclear who the new parent company will be. Meanwhile, TikTok competitors like YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels are using TikTok’s flailing as an opportunity to lure in the platform’s creators and advertisirs. 

Krystal Scanlon, Digiday’s platforms reporter, joins the Digiday Podcast with Kimeko McCoy, senior marketing reporter and Tim Peterson, executive editor of video and audio, to talk about the effects of the ban when (or maybe if) it comes to fruition by April. 

Also on this episode, McCoy and Peterson discuss recession fears and signals and how streamers are looking to scoop up YouTube creators for shows and Scope3’s plans to pivot, bringing the ad tech company into the AI era. 

Bleeding executive talent

Scanlon: There were definitely some ad execs that were talking to me, explaining that apparently during their conversations with some TikTok execs, they were actually saying, or almost admitting finally, and taking it seriously that, ‘We don’t actually know how this is going to play out. So if you do put some upfront ad dollars to anything on our platform, what we will do is we’re [honor] a refund if we can’t actually go through with that.’ But the caveat, as it seemed from their perspective, [was] that TikTok execs were being basically just supportive partners to them. At the same time, that refund offer wasn’t actually in any form of contract. It was, you have to really trust that word of mouth. 

Peterson: There was also a bit of an executive exodus too that you’ve reported on.

Scanlon: Starting in January, we had Sameer Singh. He was the general manager of global business solutions in North America. He literally left last month, but it was announced earlier. Jack Bamberger. He was general manager of agency business for the U.S. He was reported to have left on January 3. Another really major person that even I’ve had a lot of contact with was Adrienne Lahens. She’d even been with the company for four years. Her most recent role was global head of content strategy and operations. She was such a public face for TikTok as well. I’d seen her on a number of panels. She did a lot of speaking to press and she actually announced her own departure on LinkedIn just a month ago. 

Who could buy TikTok?

McCoy: Krystal, are you getting the sense that any of these buyers – your Elon Musk and your Mr. Beast – are being taken seriously?

Scanlon: So far, at least everything that I’m seeing, everything that I’m hearing, Oracle is definitely a real front runner. That’s because, from the U.S. side, they already organized all the U.S. data. Then from the China side, they’re used to that set up so far. Elon Musk definitely would have been a front runner on the basis that he’s very powerful with President Trump, so he’d have all the green lights on his side. He’s obviously got great relationships with China because of Tesla. But so far, I’ve not really heard a lot about the others.

Competitors circling 

McCoy: You were saying at least Pinterest and a handful of other [platforms] were blatantly making the call to advertisers to be like, come [to our platform]. 

Scanlon: Yeah, there was Pinterest Chief Revenue Officer Bill Watkins. He was definitely going after all the advertisers, that’s for sure. He posted on LinkedIn, saying, we are here to help all of our clients and agency partners because many of them were, in his words, are “urgently looking to reallocate their media dollars.” We had Substack. They were actually coming out as well, trying to get all the creators from TikTok. And even Snapchat had a find your favorites on Snapchat campaign back in January as well. 

Peterson: The Information reported, it was on January 20th, the story came out of how Meta was offering payments to top TikTok creators to be coming on to Reels. It still feels like it’s really TikTok, [Instagram] Reels and [YouTube] Shorts. That’s the tier, and then everyone else is a tier or more below that.