New Recommendations on Creative Best Practices to Drive Brand Impact on TikTok [Infographic]
TikTok continues to grow and establish itself as an essential player for advertisers. The platform has unveiled strategies behind high-performing ads and benefits from data-driven guidance to make it easier for advertisers.
Making content native
Marketing on TikTok is different from other platforms. TikTok users crave native-style content, more so than other platforms. A trend we see with all platforms that use full-screen, short-form video. Results in less successful with interruptive approaches, so you need to adhear to what people feel fit on the ‘For You’ feed for maximum branding impact.
Best practices for content
You should use both Brand-Led & Creator-Led content for the full impact. It’s important that you both have content that comes directly from the brand, and that there are similar messages from creators on the platform. In the same way that it works best when using multiple platforms to get maximum effect.
Sound, music and voice-overs
Creatives should use both music and voice-overs along with the text. IPSOS analysis clearly shows a positive correlation when using both music and voice-over. We always recommend our clients add this together with text overlays.
Use characters
People want to see characters, this can be a real person, fictional character or maschot. Our recommendation is to use people or characters they can relate to, which get a higher ad recall.
Show off your brand early
As previous research and our experience, one should show the brand in the first seconds without just showing a strangely placed logo. In addition, brand cues should be delivered several times throughout the video.
Don't forget the offer
Be clear in the messaging. Bring out the benefit and claim to get a better Ad Recall and Brand Linkage.

Behind the study
TikTok partnered with IPSOS to conduct a meta-analysis to provide data-driven best practices on creative elements. It resulted in 296 brand lift studies over one year that gained more insight into the branded content elements driving the best response.
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YouTube is focusing on Short-Form Content with Shorts on desktop
Most social media platforms focus on short video content following the success of Tiktok. Meta is currently launching Facebook Reels worldwide. It’s easy to forget that YouTube has its format with YouTube Shorts.
In a short time, YouTube has received 5 trillion views across the globe. Youtube is now showing Shorts even on desktop. With this update, the user will now be shown a row with Shorts. And Shorts will get even more focus on the platform and generate even more views.
What does this mean for Brands?
YouTube Shorts are a way for Brands to get more subscribers and direct views to a channel. By posting Shorts your brand can get more views, both on Shorts and other uploaded videos, and increase your subscribers.
In addition to creating Shorts, marketers can also collaborate with influencers on Shorts.

What is the purpose?
It’s important to note that the purpose behind creating a Shorts, TikTok or Reels may differ. While TikTok and Reels create opportunities to build brands, drive engagement or traffic to a specific product or website, Shorts create opportunities to reach more viewers and build your YouTube channel.
Recommendation
Short-form video content seems to be still growing in popularity. And YouTube is still relevant with its long-form content. TikTok has just extended its videos to 3 minutes, and Reels can now be up to 60 seconds long.
Use YouTube Shorts to complement your existing presence on YouTube. And if YouTube content hasn’t been a focus yet, we recommend you consider a strategy that includes YouTube Shorts!
Google Analytics and the question about GDPR
In recent months, there has been a lot of talk about how Google Analytics may be illegal in the EU as it may violate GDPR. There has been one verdict in Austria similar verdicts in France.
Google has now made its public statement about the implications of GDPR and Google Analytics. Specifically, Google goes through the Austrian ruling and points out that the verdict is based on a theoretical possibility that the US intelligence service could demand user data from Google. According to Google, this has never happened and will probably never happen either.
Google’s standpoint is that EU and the US must agree on matters related to data transfer. And that this issue is much bigger than whether only Google Analytics is illegal in the EU or not.
No more world wide web?
One danger is that the world will be separated into geographic areas. Europe will have its closed network, as will the US. Something we already have seen happen in other parts of the world. If we want an open, global internet, then the European Union and the US government will need to agree on a new data framework to keep us all connected.
Will server side be the solution?
Google Tag Manager Server Side makes it is possible to run our own server and own your data. The world is moving away from cookies and over to server side tracking. So this could be a viable way for Google Analytics to meet this concern and compete with other analysis tools like Matomo.
Bigger than Google Analytics
This issue is so much bigger than just Google Analytics. The EU and the US have to agree on having a functioning global web. Max Schrems says this regarding the issue: “In the long run we either need proper protections in the US, or we will end up with separate products for the US and the EU. I would personally prefer better protections in the US, but this is up to the US legislator — not to anyone in Europe.”
What does this mean for brands?
We expect that Google will go to great lengths to put in place a better-adapted scheme for GDPR. And that it will not necessarily be necessary to replace Google Analytics immediately. But you have to make an active choice if you want to own the data yourself. If you want to check out other options, there is, for example, Matomo.
Google Analytics already has some functionality to comply with the GDPR, but you may need to make changes actively. You can control data collection (eg IP anonymization, remarketing, data deletion), and Google also points out that there will be more functionality in Google Analytics within the next few weeks.

Recommendation
We do not recommend hasty decisions. Google takes the GDPR seriously and works on solutions to meet the EU’s demands.
Make sure your brand is GDPR compliant, collect consent for users where it is needed to save data (e.g., Google Analytics). Brands need to be sure to anonymize IP addresses for Google Universal Analytics (Google Analytics 4 does this automatically) and ensure that Google Analytics does not collect personal data.