TikTok’s New Marketing Partner Program Shows How It’s Growing up for Advertisers

In its latest move to support advertisers on its steadily growing platform, TikTok has announced its new Marketing Partner Program for Advertisers.

The initiative offers 19 certified partners to brands looking to reach TikTok users through in-app advertising, with support in campaign management, creative development, branded effects and measurement.

This program also follows the platform’s recent launch of TikTok for Business as an umbrella brand for its portfolio of offerings for advertisers, which it unveiled in late June prior to its debut at NewFronts. At the Interactive Advertising Bureau event, TikTok presented itself to advertisers with a new slogan, “Don’t make ads, make TikToks.”

“With the launch of TikTok For Business, we’re building new opportunities for marketers to be creative storytellers and meaningfully engage with the TikTok community,” Melissa Yang, the brand’s head of ecosystem partnerships, said in a statement.

Yang referred to its partners as “some of the most strategic and trusted leaders in the advertising industry,” and that the new program would give marketers “access to more tools” to create, measure and optimize ad campaigns on the video-sharing app.

In what appeared to be efforts to fulfill a NewFronts promise that the app would deliver business outcomes for advertisers on its platform, TikTok announced in July that it would be expanding targeting capabilities with a self-serve platform it launched in beta last year. This new partner program appears to be yet another step toward maturation for TikTok.

Among more than a dozen of the partners involved in the new program include customer experience management platform Sprinklr, creative analytics and post-production platform VidMob, production studio Unit9 and data, insights and consulting company Kantar.

“Gen Z and modern customers want a brand experience that’s authentic,” Sprinklr CEO and founder Ragy Thomas said in a statement. “This partnership is an opportunity for brands to meaningfully connect with customers on TikTok while using Sprinklr’s advanced AI and enterprise-grade governance to increase return on ad spend and protect brand reputation.”

Despite an ongoing legal battle with the president of the United States and uncertainty surrounding its future owners (Microsoft and Walmart have teamed up in a bid to buy the app), the platform has seen tremendous growth throughout the pandemic. Early on this spring, the age range of users expanded well beyond the teens largely responsible for its initial success, with millennials downloading the app at much higher rates than any other age bracket in April.

This article was written by Kathryn Lundstrom from Adweek and was legally licensed through the Industry Dive publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@industrydive.com.