BY: Alecia Hicks
From the consumers’ perspective, it may look like there isn’t much effort put into evaluating how a viewer reacts to ads on their social media feed. However, TikTok is on a mission to thoroughly evaluate how its users are reacting to the ads between their videos.
TikTok started off as an app that offers short-clip videos. Its videos ranged from 15-30 seconds. Once the app received a lot of attention, quickly becoming a worldwide sensational app, it began to incorporate ads into its feed. Over the years, social media has been known to make creators and/or brands an overnight phenomenon. Because of the speedy popularity that TikTok has gained, brands have quickly jumped onto the app to promote their products. The idea of ads turning into a video format is fairly new and is definitely an increasing trend among social media platforms. TikTok has taken this a step further and introduced the idea of short ads to blend in with the rest of the feed.
TikTok has done extensive research such as heart-rate monitoring, eye tracking, and GSR technology to determine how effective ads are. What they have found is that grand recall is very strong, even if the ad was viewed a few times. They also discovered that ads on TikTok take less time to make an impact versus ads on other social media platforms, which is a positive thing.
Another positive attribute is that brand messaging was higher on TikTok than on other apps. Of course, the brand and what they choose to showcase within their ad also play a part in the success an ad might have. Overall, the data that has been gathered is that TikTok users are open to seeing promotional content throughout their feed.