TikTok World 2023 centers on education and automation

The news: TikTok hosted its third annual product summit, TikTok World, on Tuesday. This year’s event was closed to the press and featured a more subdued set of product launches than in previous years.

• The centerpiece of Tuesday’s show was TikTok World Hub, a centralized learning center intended to help educate brands on how to optimize their TikTok campaigns. The hub outlines TikTok’s suite of advertising solutions and gives advertisers access to best practices focused on branding, commerce, performance, and creative.
• TikTok also introduced TikTok Fundamentals, an advertising framework consisting of three pillars: Fuel (with data), Build (start small and iterate), and Automate.

TikTok’s automation offering: Developing ad creative is still one of the biggest pain points for TikTok advertisers. Automation is TikTok’s answer to that problem.

• TikTok’s Smart Creative automates parts of the content creation process for advertisers.
• Smart creative is the content-side complement to Smart performance campaigns, TikTok’s fully automated ad-buying capability, rolled out in October 2022.

TikTok also touted ByteDance-owned app Capcut as a go-to service for ad creation on the platform. Capcut was the second-most downloaded app on iOS and Android in the US during Q1 2023, up from the third spot in Q4 2022, per data.ai.

The big picture: TikTok already has the most developed portfolio of short-video ad products and creative tools. But as competitors enhance their short-video offerings for advertisers, having educational tools and infrastructure to simplify advertising on the platform will help TikTok keep its competitive edge.