Media Monday

TikTok Connects Brands to User-Generated Ads with New Feature

By Amelia Ziegler , Senior Media Buyer

TikTok is now allowing brands to request video submissions from creators to run as in-feed ads—and for creators to earn a cut of the revenue from those submitted videos.? The “TikTok Creative Challenge” enables brands to publish “challenges,” which are essentially creative briefs, consisting of an overview of the brand, talking points and brand assets to potentially include in the video, as well as information about the brand’s target audience.? Qualified creators—or those who have at least 50,000 followers, are based in the U.S. and are at least 18 years old—can scroll through these briefs on the Creative Challenge landing page and submit a video to any brand for them to review. Unlike the platform’s “Branded Mission” tool that enables brands to solicit user-submitted videos to put paid support behind, the videos shared with brands through the Creative Challenge feature appear only as in-feed ads, rather than being posted to the brand’s or the creator’s account.? Unlike traditional brand deals, marketers don’t pay an upfront fee to creators through the Creative Challenge feature. Instead, creators’ incomes through this program are performance-based, including views, clicks and conversions, among other factors. According to a February post on TikTok’s website, this payment model is designed to “incentivize” creators to “create quality video ads.”?

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Google Video Ads Face Scrutiny Over Inventory Quality

By Rhiannon Slack , Digital Media Buyer

A new report shows that brands were running in a pool of low-quality websites via Google Video Ads. The report from Adalytics suggests that Google could have “misled” advertisers by serving video ads that did not adhere to Google’s own video standards. ? The report explored campaigns from dozens of major brands, including Johnson & Johnson, American Express, Disney+ and others, where YouTube-style skippable ads went to third-party websites. The YouTube ads, familiar to most, include a skip button in which advertisers only pay when the full video is viewed. When the video is completed, this is supposed to indicate a high-quality connection to the brand. Typically, these ads will play with sound, after a user initiates the video. However, Adalytics has discovered ads that auto-played muted ads running on spammy websites, with video players hidden away where the user would have trouble finding the skip button, causing these spammy sites to be marked as a high-quality view that advertisers end up paying for.??

Google has disputed the report saying that it “made extremely inaccurate claims about the Google Video Partner (GVP) network.”

“The report wrongly implies that most campaign spend runs on GVP rather than YouTube. That’s just not right,” Marvin Renaud, Google’s director of global videos solutions, stated in a blog post. “The overwhelming majority of video ad campaigns serve on YouTube.Video advertisers can also run ads on GVP, a separate network of third-party sites, to reach additional audiences, if it helps them meet their business objectives.”

Adalytics claims that it studied campaigns where 42% to 75% of ad spend went toward Google partner sites instead of directly to YouTube. Whereas, Google claims that GVP accounts for about 20% of ad campaigns on average, and are a method of gaining extra, quality reach for campaigns. “Advertisers can always work with their account reps if they want to exclude GVP inventory,” says an unnamed Google rep.?

Brands can request refunds from Google if any ads ran in places not approved by the advertisers, or in positions that did not meet Google’s standards.

Read more here.