Joy and Creativity: Why TikTok's Popularity Exploded During the Pandemic

has enjoyed meteoric growth over the past year. It's Chinese parent company, byte Dance, has also been drawn into the geopolitical tensions between the US and China, but the drama hasn't dampened the interest of marketers in using the platform and it's many tools that are designed, in Chandley's words,

to inspire creativity and spark joy. In the conversation. Up next, the former Facebook executive offers insights into TikTok's rise and how the user base and audience has changed during the pandemic. Welcome back to Strictly Business. I'm really excited to hear from Blake, who is TikTok's VP of Global Business Solutions and head of ad Sales for one of the most dynamic media platforms that has come along in the in the last few years, a time when we have seen

no shortage of new platforms arriving. But TikTok has made quite an impact in a short time, and we're fortunate to have Blake to talk to us about the service and its evolution. Thank you so much for joining us, Blake. Oh, it's more pleasure. Thanks for having me. Well, you are coming on just about your one year anniversary with TikTok, a company that has been much in the news and

has made a big impact on pop culture. Can you tell us about, you know what, there were so many there were so many extraordinary circumstances of circumstances and conditions that that certainly made a lot of you know, made for ripe conditions for people looking for new kinds of short form content and new avenues for creativity, which is one of the things that TikTok really has inspired. Can you talk us through sort of what were some of

the accelerants that made such a huge growth here for TikTok. Yeah, of course, Well one almost two years now, funny enough,

and time time flies. I've been with the company um and twenty was an interesting year by any measure, as you can imagine, um, you know, from our perspective, what started out as what we thought would be an amazing growth here quickly shifted as COVID came in and people started working from home, and then we had Black Lives Matter, And there are a number of things that happened through the year, but if you look at overall, I think one of the things that always surprised us and looking

back to probably shouldn't come as any surprise given the platform is you know, content platform, it's an entertainment platform. Is the universal appreciation, universal kind of adoption of the platform across all generations. And our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy and I think we did that throughout the year in a year where a lot of people really appreciated and needing some of that on a daily basis. But what really struck me was there was a shift us as we saw the year go on

in two areas. One was around content, right, so diversity and content um and then the kinds of creators that were creating content the platform, you know, went from you know, pretty simple offering to diversity around cooking and d i y and education, and we had these amazing creators just telling inspiring stories all year long, and that that just continued, which then led to the adoption of the platform for variety of audiences and so the diversity diversification of our

audience base. UM went from a relatively younger audience I gen z to a an audience has spanned multi generations UM.

And I think it's all based around storytelling. And I was thinking the other day, is we all kind of have our own thoughts going into a new year that I remember days when we sit around television as a family and watch TV, right, and and that was you know, going back aways, and it was linear TV, and that's just what we did, right, UM on a Sunday night or dus And night, or whenever we have our favorite TV show and we'd all sit around his family and

we just don't do that anymore. Screens have really fragmented that experience. And so you know, my kids have their screens and we have all my wife and I have our screens, and most of the time they don't connect. Right.

What we saw a lot of this year, and then looking back, it is a phenomenon, was this connection of generations, right, and so people were treating TikTok's and younger generations were introducing their parents and grandparents the platform, and so there was this this unity again around a family, around this

content that just didn't exist before. And so I kind of feel like there's this interesting movement to stake a place around You're connecting that family again, which you know, we we we we feel really strongly is part of our mission to really you know, to really aspire creativity and bring joy across all different people. It's a different form of family friendly entertainment on TikTok for sure, much

of it. What was it that and I'm sure that diversification of audience must have been music to your ears, being you know, in in charge of selling advertising on the platform. What was it though that in in your experience, what was it that drove the initial adoption? What was the I think that I brought people to the platform. Yeah,

it's a great it's a great question. I think that a lot of people you associate associate us with being a social platform, right, and there's this automatic direct association with some other players in the space of which role intimately familiar. I mean, I think the big difference is we're not like we're we're we're interest based for content

platform UM. And so the ability to people to find content that's relevant and interesting in them is really what you know, really really what the four you Feed does, and that's very, very different than the experience people are gonna find anywhere else where. It's reliant to on a connection to friends and family and so on and so forth. And this is really, in my view, the next generation

of television, right. And it's it's it's short form, it's easy digest it doesn't require a huge commitment in terms of time, although people do find themselves once they start kind of getting sucked into the TikTok like uh, you know, vortex and spending a lot of time. UM. But it's easily digestible, it's interesting, and it's all designed specifically for you based on your interests UM. And that's how the

four you Feed really has generated a lot of positivity. UM. Of course, TikTok has been in the headlines, you know, again, coming off of a pretty incredible year for the for culture, for politics, for certainly for public health. UM. You know, TikTok and the parent company, bike Dance have been in the headlines. There has been there's been a lot of strife at the at the political level in the US about about the Chinese ownership of bike Dance and how how that you know, may or may not be figuring

into larger kind of geopolitical and business considerations. I realized that all of that is going on, you know, at a step above the area that you oversee. But can you talk about how that the impact of the political drama and the uncertainty about whether the company had to be sold to continue to operate in the US or how did how did that impact your growth? Obviously TikTok is growing apace, but was that was that difficult? Did

that impede growth at all? And was at a difficult conversation for you with the marketers that you are selling the service to. Ye, It's an appropriate question, and it's something that's you know, it's not something else spent a lot of time to go too deep in because we're you know, still currently in discussions you know, with the governments and the regulatory body about you know, about some of that. But listen, we we've been pretty clear that one there's been a lot of media coverage on it,

right and uh, you couldn't escape it. It's it's it's dropped off a little bit in some of the current UM media considerations. But one we've been pretty clear that we we just disagree with some of the fundamental premises that the government put forward UM in terms of security of data, access of data. You know, we're TikTok does not exist in China. Are data don sit in China, It's it's u S data sits in the US. It

was somewhere doundancy in Singapore. So, like you know, we're very comfortable with with the with the precautions and the things that we've done as a company UM, but we've agreed we disagree with the government on that one in many cases, but we continue to work with them like we have we have ongoing almost daily dialogue with the governments around how do we resolve this because at the end of the day, we want to protect our users and we want to you know, that's a huge game

and we have u is protecting our user base and it's a number one priority as a company. And so anything we do to empower our our audience or a hundred million plus users in the US, UM protect them, empower them. It's it's really we feel an obligation to protect them in that sid and so you know that comes with it. You know a lot of different discussions we need to have and and to get people comfortable with that. But we're ongoing negotiations, discussions with the objective

of having an outcome that's positive for our users. Do you have a sense that the the administration changed, the incoming by an administration might have a different view. I can't really speak to that right now. I know there's a lot of discussions taking places. You can imagine there's a lot of um dialogue across the aisle everywhere. But right now, I think I'll just let that be and we'll see where things fall over the next few weeks. Was it at all? Has it again at the sort

of Washington drama? Has it hasn't been a damper at all? Four marketers? I mean, it seems like the TikTok story for the the TikTok itself has been nothing but growth. And I'm guessing that that's that that is what what people want to hear at a time when it's you know, it's reaching audiences is harder than ever. Yeah, we've been really really surprised surprise of the support I mean the community, the advertising community in general, whether the advertisers agencies have

really supported us through this whole process. And we've had obviously discussions and dialogue around it, UM and but but the universal support received has been UM really really positive. We spend a lot more of our time talking around brand safety and community safety and what we're doing not only is an individual company, but as an industry to

protect users. Then we have around some of the political dynamics that are taking place, and so the vast majority of our time has spent talking around those subject matters. You do a lot of obviously a lot of creative things with marketers and sponsorship. How can you talk in general about kind of how your your typical how a typical market deal with tiptop TikTok works? Is it? Is it CPM based, is it time? How do you how

do you? I said, if you start the highest level, it's it's a fundamental change, right, we're being a little bit I think we'll be a little bit disruptive in that sense. UM. Digital marketing has gotten very much around

programmatic and it's you know, it's very tech driven. UM, it's we've lost the art of storytelling and I think that's something that we identified very early on the brands one more of and given the inspirational environment and the storytelling takes place every day with our users and our comedy in general, what brands want to do is find a voice in that right. And so the conversations we have a brand's first and foremost is around what did

their voice look like? An environment around authenticity, right, how do they storytell? How do they how are they quote less than perfect? Because at the end of the day, you know the concept of going and creating a million dollar mini film and then put it onto all these different platforms, it doesn't resonate as well in the put more. People want to see authenticity. Um, you know, they want they want brands come in and be involved. They want

brands to invite them to be involved. And so the conversation first and foremost is around creativity and the role the brands play the platform and the roles the brands play a really really important role. Um. We do not want brands to be perceived as kind of advertising. I mean I have to watch it in order to have

access to this free content. We want users look at the branding content and say, wow, that was cool, I want to watch it again, right, And so we see that kind of path, we see that kind of passion of brands to do it right. And there are a number of brands that have UM. All year long, we saw amazing executions from brands that really inspired people and drew them in and and ask people to participate. And so that's the first and foremost the conversations we have

with brands. And then the next question is how do we amplify that and how do we you know, kind of invest behind that to make sure we get the right reach and frequency and the right kpi s or measurement that that that they need in order to you

to invests. But would you say that marketers come to you do they Are they generally looking kind of in the age demographic based buying or are they looking for we want to be in your anything that involves cooking or anything that involves skateboarding or something like by topic

and more or is it a mix of both. It's mixed both, Like you have people that you know, certainly there are certain audiences the brands are targeting based on their brand right UM, and so they're super there's typically some demographic considerations as well as contextual um and so we work with brands on both those parts. We'll take a quick break before hearing more from Blake Chandley about TikTok Ad campaigns that move the needle this year. Welcome

back to strictly Business. Here's more with TikTok Ad sales chief Blake Channelly. You give us a for instance of a of an execution or two that you think really harnessed the capabilities that TikTok brings, the unique capabilities of TikTok Um. Yeah, I think that, I think that, I think I think there were two that they come up and I look at I look at it almost in

two seconds. They are the big brands, the ones we all know, these national brands that are amazing marketers that we have our smaller SMB community which is actually doing some really in traditional stuff as well. Um the there was one there was one campaign by under Armour that was done this kind of the holiday period which was show up and show off, which we had. They retained

a number of our creators and that was another. That's our core premacy work with brands, lars connecting with the creators or some people call them influencers, but um to help them tell their story and bring their story in life from the platform. And so they retained a number of their athletes to commit and do some interesting things with some music in the BA around that were there were there were great right, whether it be basketball related

or whatever it might be. And then they basically put that out there to our community and said, you know, show up and show off, and it was around skills, around different things. And then they allowed the community to take that and to make it their own right. And so it could have been in the basketball space. It could have been someone either on a basketball's court doing something amazing with a trick shot or a donk or

whatever it might be. Or there were camping. There was some creative with someone in a supermarket grabbing you know, paper towels off the top shelf. Given all their shows empty, and that was their version of showing off, right, And so have you generated? I think there are one point four billion pieces of created at one point four million pieces of creative that were that were developed by our user base in conjunction of the campaign and had eight

billion views. I mean, that was one that was great, But another one which I thought was really amazing and

it goes to storytelling. Was Cheerios. Um, I don't know if you're you saw this, but you know, Cheerios had an amazing commercial back in the nineties which was a great mother with a baby with cheerios on the on the on the top and then you know, normally you'd be feeding cheerials to the baby and this time the grandmother was Christmas time, saying, here's where you live, and the baby wants the cheerios and she holds it up and the baby's like, I'm gonna eat it, and then

they she puts it down because here's your uncle John lives. Here's where I live, and unfortunately we all camp be together,

but I'm glad that I'm here with you. And she puts two curios together and it was just a very emotional, you know, and you know General Mills and Turials, you know, no family and Christmas and holidays now and so that was that was done years and years ago television campaign while there was a creator on the platform that basically came up with an idea that said, you know, General Mills, please please please recreate this today, but use zoom and

usually and so and literally the brand and she tagged General mills in and literally the brand brought it back to life, and they did an incarnation of two thousand twenty right, which had the same grandmother and the same child baby which was now grown up, and they're connecting on zoom and they had the whole behind the scenes thing, but it was very much still this emotional connection for

the brand to the holiday season. And so like again that storytelling can't take place anywhere else, it has to take place in a place like this and uh, and this is one of those kind of tear jerker moments. You go, Okay, that was just an amazing piece of content. Forget the fact that it brought to us by it

by brand. So those are two games. And then on small business, there was there's an amazing campaign that was done through the through the holiday of the shopping season by a small business called Two Blind Brothers, and he got some national coverage. But there are these two Blind Brothers um Bradford Bryant who had this concept, you know, called shop blind and what they essentially did was a challenge is said to people in their whole lives they've had to rely on others to shop for them or

read menus or whatever it might be. And they started campaigns the Shop Blind meaning come come to our website. Um, you know, basically, give us a price point and we're gonna send youselfing. You don't know what it is, right, um and and and and and all Pro Hunter proceeds were going towards you know, retinal retinal research to help cure certain forms of blindness little people are affected by.

And the idea of going to saying, you know, basically saying here's my price point and then stepping back was kind of scary, but like tens and tens and tens of thousands of people went and shop blind, right, and it just it became kind of a universal viral, had a viral component to it, which was good for you moment, which of course, you know, giving to any kind of mount for profit is, but also a brand and a product and shopping and e commerce and it all tied

it together in a really kind of magical way. So those are the kind of things that we love seeing on the platform m M. And for you know, the more you grow, the more opportunities you the more opportunities you have. And as you say, these are these are

fairly unique opportunities, particularly for marketers. The downside, of course, of user generated content and having an open platform like that, is that you know, a content moderation has become a huge issue for all social media platforms large and small with your mission to spark creativity and and create bursts of joy, which goodness knows we need more than ever. Now,

how are you going? How are you watching the skies to make sure that bad actors don't get into your platform and put things on that you know are are decidedly less than joyful. Yeah, it's the number one thing we think about as you get imagining, especially in days like we've led up to this conversation. Um, it's an industry thing. As an industry, it's it's it's an opportunity for us to do better um. And we can call

it issues whichever. It's a challenge UM. And like most we use a combination of community guidelines which are very strict around hate and speech and misinformation and everything else UM, as well as technology so machine learning to identify that as content gets loaded into platform, using machine learning to quickly identifying and training the machines to look for content

that falls into a certain pattern or behavior. That's um, you know, snonymous with some of these behaviors we don't want and pulling that content for whatever reaches for whatever reaches the graph. And you know, according to our last transparency employee pulled down a hundred million pieces of content, of which nineties percent were before whatever you hit the graph and the rest of simil reactionary. And then we use human moderation, which is as people reporting content that's

inappropriate they think should be considered. You know, we use the combination of machine learning and human moderators to make sure that we're identifying that that behavior, that content and pulling it down very very quickly. And then obviously, you know, on the back end, making sure that those folks that are doing that, you know, are pulled from the platform and so on. Has um has I mean with a hundred million pieces of content, that's a lot too, that's

a lot to keep up with. Machine learning can do so much. Have have you found that they're given the nature of TikTok, the nature of stuff that is objectionable? Does it does it? Is it? Is it political? Is it more violent? Or is there like an is there like a thread to what you're finding that is objectionable on TikTok is attract a certain kind of of objectionable type of content versus maybe you would see on a broader social platform. Yeah, I think so many other platforms

have different issues. Like I think these social the social platforms where people are connected via social kind of like their social behaviors, they have a very different challenge than we do. You know, when people are coming to the platform to create your inspired to creativity and bring joy. Um, the expectation when people come into it's just that they're not looking for that kind of content, whereas in some other platforms, I think it's expected at this point, and

so that's where the voices are loudest um. And so to be fair, we have some activism, like when Black Lives Matters came up, there were people that were you know, discussing that subject, but they were doing it in a really inspirational way. It wasn't in a derogatory or crew way. It was done more of an inspirational way. And so we want people to to express express themselves. But when it turns to hate, or turns to misinformation or whatever it might be, we need to make sure that our

our communities protected. So we worked really diligently on that. Have you had some tough calls into when you sort of when the human beings get involved. Have you had tough calls about what what is the line between what's okay and not okay? So the trust and safety team falls and are dip different remits. So I'd be remiss if I were to try and step in and and

go too deep on the subject. I think that everybody today's world is changing so fast, and you know, people that are trying to express themselves in a negative way will continue to try and find ways to do that. You need to be able to react accordingly, and so you know, certainly there are probably moments there are tough

decisions to make. UM I'm not literally to talk about those here, but certainly we'll continue to evolve our platform and iterate our platform and our policies to protect our community. Best weekend. Yeah, thank you, and that I can imagine that there's no more urgent and tougher job in the company than than keeping an eye on all of that, especially because you have the reputation for being for being um for being very you know, open and friendly to

to all demographics. UM, I know Blake. You spent a long time at Facebook before joining TikTok. What what did you learn in your time in the formative years of Facebook and watching its evolution that what did you learn from Facebook that you are applying it at TikTok now? And are you seeing in any major differences in the in the growth trajectories of the platforms. Yeah, I think the growth trajectors are very similar UM and and Facebook at the time. Going back, I was there for a

decade from two thousand seven to seventeen. If you kind of rewind back to two thousand nine ten, before Facebook became you know the big of b myth it is today. You know, social was new, right, the social graph didn't exist. It was this new concept UM that people were trying to embrace and understand and both users right on on the growth side from the user perspective, what role did play in people's lives? UM as well as brands and

and and certainly regulatory bottles and everybody else. We were all trying to make it up as we went, and so we were constantly iterating, and we were creating product, and we were moving quickly in response to different things that we saw in the market, and it's very very similar to where we are today. And we're not a social graph, we're you know, content graph from the interstgraph,

which is new. It's very it's very very different, UM, and it's had its own different opportunities and challenges and everything else. And so for us, it's really around a couple core things. One is hiring amazing people like people ultimately health to find what the future of the business will look like. And so we have great people on the product side, the ad side, marketing side, just to have amazing individuals who have open minds or what we

call learners, and we want to create a very learning culture. UM. We want to be able to move very quickly, and change is hard. Like if you look at some of the big companies now, it's much more difficult for a Facebook or Google to shift you know, bought businesses as big as they are, Whereas we're still nimble enough that we can move very very quickly UM if we see something that's working, and so we do a lost a lot,

a lot a lot of testing, iteration UM. And so some of the core values I think we saw back in the day are similar in terms of moving fast and then trying to build product that's that's relevant for our users and our brands and uh, and then there are differences, like I think that we've learned a lot from you know, around data and consumer privacy and um, you know, giving users control of of of the kind of advertising they see, which historically it wasn't necessarily built

into the business models that we think, you know, it could be could be really differentially differentiated going forward. So we're learning some things and werena do things a little bit differently, and we're gonna hopefully be a little bit disruptive in a very comfortable way. But I think the industries asked us to be, and they said, don't just come back and prom with a big audience with a

programmatic capability. They really wants to come back and allow them to storytell again and to engage audiences in a different way that they simply haven't able to do on the mobile lice Blake, why don't you leave us with that? Why don't we end with what are you're like? What are some of your most impressive growth stats from twenty or growth stats for TikTok since it really started to

take off in the US. Well, I mean, idea certainly our user based and we're now exceeding a hundred million users, which was up significantly from two thousand nineteen. And we've seen that across the world where it's not it's not really just the US we're seeing. It's um the kind of content, it's just diverse five an amazing way and types of audiences that are on the platform and changed significantly.

I won't get into the metrics from revenue and brands, but you know, certainly the industry has supported us, and for that where it's really grateful and humbled. We think that by working with the smartest people in the agency world, in the client world, that we can build kind of future that is it is different where advertising becomes you know, anticipated and hope for versus something people deal with more to get contact. And so those are things that we're

really focused on right now. Blake, thank you so much for taking the time to talk us through what's going on at this most dynamic media platform. We will definitely stay tuned. Thanks for listening, and please leave us a review at Apple Podcasts. We love to hear from listeners. Be sure to tune in next week when my guests will be Andrew Kosov and Roderick Johnson, the producers and financiers who run al Con Entertainment