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TikTok Search Ads: The Monetization Unlock

| Emily Smith

The stratospheric growth in TikTok’s user base has arguably been the biggest cultural shift in media consumption for the last decade. It’s no surprise then that brands have jumped at the advertising opportunity to drive traffic and sales. TikTok search ads, now in beta, represent a significant opportunity but require some strategic thinking.

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TikTok Has a Massive Moment in 2022

| Mike O'Brien

TikTok, the hugely popular short-form video site owned by Chinese firm ByteDance, had quite a year in 2022, surpassing 1 billion users globally and making itself a force to be reckoned with in advertising, ecommerce and fulfillment, becoming the latest competitor to Amazon’s dominance. But government bans are applying heat.

Amazon Inspire

Amazon Inspire Treads in TikTok Territory

| Mike O'Brien

Amazon is launching a TikTok-like feature called Inspire that lets users scroll through short-form videos and hopefully buy stuff from brands, but industry observers don’t seem too inspired by the company’s latest venture into social commerce, an area that hasn’t really exploded. It’s the latest in a decade of social commerce experiments.

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TikTok Reportedly Tests In-App Shopping in U.S.

| Mike O'Brien

As Amazon stumbles, planning to lay off ten thousand workers, drastically scaling back its facilities plans and missing earnings forecasts, ascending rival TikTok is becoming more of a globally dominant behemoth, day by day. The latter reportedly began testing an in-app shopping feature with select U.S. retailers last week.

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CPG and its New Direction: Emerging vs. Legacy Brands

| Karla Crawford Kerr

The CPG industry is evolving faster than ever. Nearly everything about the category has changed, including the way brands develop and bring products to market. Also, inflation puts pressure on marketing budgets, loyalty is weakening and younger consumers have higher expectations and tend to be skeptical of advertising efforts.

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Growing Social Commerce Starts With Customer Trust

| Rafael Lourenco

Retailers should consider the impact their social strategy elements have on customer trust. This includes your choice of social platforms, the payment methods you accept, how you screen orders for fraud and how you safeguard your brand presence on social media. Identify the platforms your customers trust the most.

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TikTok Creating Fulfillment Network in U.S., Globally

| Mike O'Brien

TikTok is looking to create a global logistics infrastructure, including in the U.S., to fulfill merchant orders on its TikTok Shops ecommerce platform, creating a good deal of industry buzz based on its rapid growth as a dominant social media and advertising platform, as first reported by Axios.

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DTCs: Effective Alternatives to 3P Cookies

| Brian Eberman

Now that 3P cookie targeting is on its way out, thanks to Apple and Google sunsetting them in 2023, brands will need new targeting and measurement strategies. DTCs need to start now to put in places alternative forms of measurement in order to restore their advertising performance and attribution capabilities. 

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How Brands Can Connect with the Influenced Consumer

| Ericka Podesta McCoy

Brands have always sought to align themselves with media and messaging most likely to prove influential among core audiences. But today, even the way in which consumers are influenced—and to what extent—is proving to be a defining trait of certain groups. Learn how influenced consumers are a group worth paying attention to.

Social Commerce a Nearly Universal Experience In 2022

| Mike O'Brien

Social commerce is not slowing down, based on a survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers from Sprout Social, with over two-thirds of respondents saying they make a purchase through a social channel in 2021, and a whopping 98% saying they planned to do so this year.