As TikTok continues to grow, and add more users over time, it’s also working to refine its ad offerings, and attract more investment in its promotional tools.

And it seems, based on this research at least, that TikTok campaigns are generating results, with Kantar’s latest ‘Media Reactions’ study showing that TikTok is ‘the preferred advertising environment for both brands and their audiences’, while brand-building campaigns on the platform are 7x more impactful among people with high ad equity.

Kantar’s 2021 Media Reactions report incorporates responses from over 14,500 consumers and 900 senior marketers around the world, providing a broad scope of opinion around key ad shifts and trends. The main focus elements of Kantar’s report are:

• The Digital Dilemma - How can you maximize consumer engagement without irritating in an increasingly digital world?
• The “Glocal” Dilemma - How do you balance the benefits of scale from global media platforms with the promise of relevance from local media gems?
• The Innovator’s Dilemma - How can media brands get the balance right between maintaining trust while driving innovation?

Based on these elements, Kantar found TikTok ads, in particular, to be effective on several fronts.

As explained by TikTok:

“TikTok's ad equity has been ranked #1 in the world two years running because of our creative, authentic community and brand-friendly platform. Reaching consumers in an environment built for discovery gives businesses the power to build great ad experiences - and offers audiences the chance to discover compelling, fun content.”

Among the study’s findings, Kantar’s research indicates that the collaborative atmosphere of TikTok leads to less intrusive, and more creative ad campaigns. That aligns with TikTok’s ‘Make TikToks, Not Ads’ approach, which calls on marketers to really learn the platform, and its key trends, and align with how users are engaging, as opposed to taking a more disruptive, traditional marketing approach.

TikTok ads also scored higher for delivering relevance and usefulness than they did in the previous year’s report, while it also beat all others in sentiment according to household decision-makers, in almost every vertical.

In some ways, TikTok likely benefits from being the new kid on the block, with consumers more open to TikTok promotions due to overall usage trends. But really, the main note here is that brands have quickly learned that traditional ad approaches simply don’t work on the platform – you can’t just repurpose your campaigns from other platforms and mediums and expect TikTok users to pay attention.

If you want to stop people swiping on by, you need to make TikTok ads that feel natural in user feeds, and that broader push has made advertisers conform to the app’s general content principles, which is why its ads feel less intrusive than, say, pre or mid-roll disruptions on other platforms.

In aligning with these findings, TikTok recommends that advertisers:

• Give users a reason to join in - TikTok is built on creative collaboration. Grow your presence with that in mind and find fun ways to get audiences involved with your story.
• Make TikTok trends work For You - Trends are a powerful way to engage with audiences through relevance and realness. Build content around the new sounds, hashtags, filters, and video formats that emerge on TikTok each week.
• Tap into our creator talent - Our creators bring a whole new meaning to "influential." Leverage the unique relationship between user and creator, and deliver your brand message with a bang.

These are some good tips, with the basic ethos, again, being ‘Make TikToks, Not Ads’.

If you’re not sure exactly how to do that, you can check out TikTok’s Ad Library, which highlights some great examples of effective TikTok clips, while it’s also recently launched a new Creative Center to showcase more top-performing campaigns.