2021-of-a-kind on TikTok

The year 2021 was one-of-a-kind for all of us. On TikTok, we saw our global community and brands come together to inspire, create, learn, laugh, connect, and shape culture. At TikTok For Business, we celebrated new partnerships, unveiled new products, spearheaded safety and transparency initiatives, and continued to provide a platform where brands of all sizes could find their audience.

Here are a few highlights from an unforgettable year.

Exciting Product Announcements

🏆TikTok Creator Marketplace Serving both brands and creators, we opened an end-to-end self-serve portal that makes it easy to find the right partner, manage creative collaborations, receive detailed data insights, and promote branded content with targeted ads.

🏆Creative Center Need inspiration for your TikTok campaigns? We packed everything you need to make better TikTok videos—from dashboards and insights to top-performing ad creative and a browser-based Audio Library—all in one place.

🏆Lead Generation Unveiled in April, Lead Generation is TikTok's first-party solution to help businesses reach prospects and seamlessly convert them to customers.

🏆Spark Ads We created a new ad format allowing brands to create ads from organic TikToks while maintaining the native feel and functionality of organic posts — a powerfully authentic way to reach your audience and promote your business.

🏆 TikTok Shopping TikTok's effect on shopping trends is a powerful and well-documented phenomenon. TikTok Shopping is a suite of solutions, features, and advertising tools that give businesses the opportunity to capture the full power of TikTok's influence on purchase decisions.

Campaigns That Inspired

🏆JIF #JifRapChallenge With this Branded Hashtag Challenge, JIF perfectly blended insights and culture to spark a big brand moment.

🏆Up #UpEasyMoney Correlating with the fun and easy messaging of its product, digital banking app Up used a Gamified Branded Effect to rake in over 25 million views!

🏆Kia #встилеRIO Thanks to a custom Branded Effect and a star-studded cast of TikTok creators, KIA’s engagement rate went into overdrive and hit 13.7%!

🏆McDonald's Jingle Remix To celebrate 50 years down under, McDonald's invited six up-and-coming artists to reinterpret the brand's iconic jingle. The sound-first campaign racked up over 41 million impressions.

Small Business, Big Waves

🏆Sider's Woodcrafting Owner Bruce Graybill joined TikTok to share his story and find a community. Now, he has over 150,000 followers and says it’s responsible for 90% of his sales.

🏆Izola's Country Cooking Izola's began using TikTok during COVID lockdowns in order to reach new customers—and it worked! Since doing so, their sales have tripled as the word of their southern soul food reaches far and wide.

🏆Tzuki Indonesia As a new skincare brand, Tzuki wanted to grow. So they used TikTok’s Smart Video tool to create engaging ads and generated >189K clicks. Now, the brand's whole marketing strategy is built around TikTok.

Major Moves in Brand Safety

🏆 TikTok Inventory Filter With Inventory Filter, we're enabling advertisers to gain more control over where they'd like their ads to run adjacent to, and feel more confident on our platform. Our solution is aligned to the GARM Brand Safety and Suitability Framework to meet global, industry-wide standards.

🏆IAS, OpenSlate & Zefr Partnerships With Integral Ad Science, OpenSlate, and Zefr, we continue to ensure that brands' campaigns run adjacent to content that's suitable for the brand. By working with them, we'll be able to further ensure that brands' campaigns run adjacent to verified content. Plus, our partnership with OpenSlate, which began in 2020, gives us the tools we need to keep TikTok as a safe place for brand partners. And this year, that partnership will expand to additional countries and buying types, including Auction and Reach & Frequency.

🏆Global TAG Brand Safety Certification In July, TikTok was awarded the TAG Brand Safety Certified Seal by the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) at a global level. "TikTok is committed to ensuring that both users and brands have a safe space to express themselves and are always aware of the steps we are taking to make TikTok safe," said Blake Chandlee, President, Global Business Solutions at TikTok. "We're honored that TAG has recognized our global efforts to build a safer, more transparent and accountable platform. We look forward to building on our partnership with TAG to promote brand safety and improve industry standards."