Tick tock, tick tock: the countdown to the TikTok ban

Today’s Social Media advertising rates are use it or lose it:

↗️ META: $7.62 CPM | ↗️ TIKTOK: $3.69 CPM | ↘️ SNAPCHAT: $5.00 CPM

In this week’s edition: 

• 🐭 How Disney is letting brands get in the game

• Amazon’s retail ad tech: Coming to a site near you 🎁

• ♾️ Meta wants to know how much you’d pay for 15,000 likes

But first…

🚨 Biden official: TikTok won’t be banned on Sunday

Just before we hit send, news began breaking that the winds may have shifted—a bipartisan rescue effort appears to be underway to avert the TikTok ban. It’s unclear whether or how such a rescue would be enacted. But Politico reports that high-ranking Democrats including Senator Chuck Schumer are trying to persuade the White House to step in and delay the ban. NBC goes further, reporting that President Joe Biden’s administration is actively working on a solution, and quoted an unnamed Biden administration official as saying “Americans shouldn’t expect to see TikTok suddenly banned on Sunday.” 

Which is a strange thing to say, since that is exactly what the U.S. government has been telling Americans to expect for months. In fact, by many reports TikTok still plans to pro-actively shut down the app on Sunday. According to Reuters, “users attempting to open the app will see a pop-up message directing them to a website with information about the ban.” 

Advertisers, then, are still forced to plan for the worst. Barring a last-ditch solution, U.S. TikTok ads will stop serving on Sunday. What’s still unclear is what happens to U.S. agencies and brands running TikTok campaigns in Canada, Mexico, and elsewhere overseas. Will TikTok Ads Manager be impacted by the ban? According to our TikTok agency partner, they can’t share technical details, but “In the event of a US ban, we are working to ensure US customers will have uninterrupted access to their TikTok Ads Manager accounts and will be able to place international campaign orders from such accounts.” TikTok also says they “have plans in place to ensure you will have continued access to critical business assets and data in our systems.” 😬🤞

🔥 Our take: Even if no solution is reached and TikTok pulls the plug on Sunday, we expect that a deal to bring the app back will materialize. Whether that takes days, weeks, or months is anyone’s guess. A bipartisan Congressional agreement during Trump’s first week in office would likely bring the ban to a quick end, but if a court battle ensues, the road back could be long and winding.

The Inside Scoop🍦: Now trending in performance media

🐭 At CES, Disney announced it is expanding its gamified ad unit, offering users polling, trivia, and other “advergames.” The first of these—Quiz Show and Beat the Clock—rolled out in June on Hulu and ESPN, allowing brands to deliver a short trivia screen or incorporate a brand identity directly into the game. Disney says it now has more than 157 million ad-supported monthly active users (MAUs) across Disney+, ESPN+, and Hulu.

🎁 Amazon is expanding its advertising business by letting other sites use its ad technology for their own stores with an offering called Amazon Retail Ad Service. It’s available for U.S. retailers, which will pay fees based on usage levels, allowing them to show “contextually relevant ads in the right place and at the right time” in search results, product pages and other areas of their site. The move will provide Amazon with valuable data to enhance its ad prediction and recommendation capabilities across a broader retail ecosystem.

♾️ Meta just ditched fact-checkers. Is another major U-turn on the horizon? This past week, some Instagram users have been prompted with a survey suggesting that Meta is considering an option that would let creators and brands pay for views, likes, and other engagements in the app. That would be a big change, because buying followers goes against Meta’s community standard rules. Is Meta reversing course so they can incentivize more people to pay for Meta Verified?

👻 Snapchat is not being subtle with a newly launched campaign that they hope will appeal to migrating TikTok users and creators. “Find Your Favorites on Snapchat” features different Snap stars talking about the content that they create, and how you can find them in the app.

🚨 Buyer Beware: Meta “enhancement” alert

Watch out for a new “enhancement” that’s being auto-applied to new and existing carousel ads, even if you opted out of enhancements when you originally published the ad. Like so:

🐘The Elephant In the Room: Our weekly office poll!

The undisputed winner of this week’s TikTok DeathWatch? That would be Xiaohongshu, a Chinese Instagram/Pinterest knockoff whose name translates to “Little Red Book”—although TikTok refugees, with apologies to Mao, are calling it RedNote. This week, it topped the Apple downloads chart, producing a Nixon-goes-to-China moment of cultural exchange—albeit mostly in the form of cat memes. While everyone predicted the bulk of TikTok’s traffic would end up going to Reels or YouTube Shorts, a host of TikTok clones have rocketed into the charts this week. Which leads us to this week’s question: If the ban goes down, where you scrollin’ come Monday?

Which leads us to this week’s poll question:

📊 Last edition’s poll results: Will Meta's new rules make Facebook and Instagram better or worse? 

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Better 

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Worse

Thanks for reading! We’ll be back next week to fill your inbox with more tips, tricks, and treats from the addressable universe.

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