When TikTok first entered the digital advertising space, one of the main questions that kept coming up was: what makes a good TikTok ad? At first, this was not an easy question to answer. TikTok ads are new and best practices are not defined, and while brands are able to achieve extremely high performance, it is not clear what marks are being put in order to achieve these powerful results.
For many early adopters, that means it takes a while to figure things out and test new creative approaches — to see what works and, just as importantly, what doesn’t. This experimental approach is now actually seen as a best practice on a key platform, with TikTok advertisers being rewarded for pushing boundaries and capitalizing on changing trends that play out organically.
However, a common, sub-optimal approach to TikTok advertising is to simply copy and paste ideas from other platforms. To this day, it’s easy to see that many of the feed ads you encounter while scrolling through your TikTok feed were actually originally made for somewhere else. The most obvious giveaway is that the ad copy is often overshadowed by TikTok’s UI.
The Anatomy of Optimizing TikTok Video Ads
We are now in a phase where TikTok ad adoption is skyrocketing, which helps us better understand the key elements that make up an optimized TikTok ad…
Leverage User Generated Content (UGC)
Consider the vertical design of the user interface
Start with a bang and keep it fast
Amplify stories with music and sound effects
Experiment with your brand personality
To best convey these important best practices, this article takes five examples and puts them under the microscope to examine which components lead to their success as TikTok ads.
1. Hello Fresh
Brands can draw inspiration from this simple and effective approach to advertising. UGC’s focus on authenticity, combined with subtle branding, engaging editing, and impactful sound design, highlights the formula for success that doesn’t require significant investment from a production perspective.
2. Dermatology
This is perfect for brand marketing purposes, especially for CPG brands looking to effectively educate their audiences about product features .
3.Zoomerang
4. Spark app
The copy in the ad also uses stickers to further match the ad with TikTok’s organic style, helping it better resonate with the audience.
5. Haier
Haier is aware of this, and the ads above are music centric, not the other way around. Brand songs are lip-synced by the theme in the advertisement, which means that visual effects and music work harmoniously toward a common goal.