TikTok commercial lead: 'We don't want to take the role of an agency'

TikTok’s global head of business marketing and commercial partnerships, Sofia Hernandez, has said that the platform doesn’t want to work “directly” with brands. 

She said: "We don't want to work directly with any brands, we want to educate them and we want to be a partner to them when they have questions.

She added: “We don't want to take the role of an agency, creative or media, that's not my business. My business is to help the agencies be better partners to the brands.”

Hernandez said agencies were a big focus for TikTok over the coming year. She added that AI was having an impact on businesses in a “positive way”, but was moving so fast that “marketers aren’t learning it fast enough, they need to be able to go to their agencies as partners”.

She argued that the way creative agencies work is “outdated” and media agencies have a “ton of work to do”.

“The way we’re used to working is a TV-first mentality”, she said, with agencies building a manifesto for each campaign, finding an exclusive director to shoot it, then working with a post-production house for “weeks”.

She said “we cannot work that way any more” and added: "It's very clear that the pain-point is good, fast, cheap. We used to say you can't have all three, now CMOs expect it."

Hernandez said that now, creators have become the “new best practice in marketing”, pointing to a previous Cannes festival where she asked creators to come up with a response to an Adidas brief on the spot.

“The way that they are connecting with their audiences and building brand love and getting people to listen, pay attention, come back. [It’s] everything a brand wants from their audience.”

TikTok’s new AI tools

Campaign’s interview with Hernandez followed TikTok's announcement at the Cannes Lions Festival that it was updating its suite of AI tools, called TikTok Symphony.

The updates include an image-to-video feature, in which advertisers can provide an image of their product and give the tool a specific prompt to make it into a video. 

Further, Symphony’s text-to-video tool will help advertisers make creative executions, while its Showcase Products tool will feature products with digital avatars.

When Campaign asked about TikTok’s approach to AI in comparison to Meta’s, with Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg planning to offer end-to-end AI advertising services, Hernandez said that the platform’s approach is “different”.

“We fundamentally believe that humans are at the centre of this evolution," she added. “We think about it as an empowering tool for humans, a supplemental tool, not a replacement.”