The platform that made your teenager dance in the kitchen is now hoping to follow her everywhere else she goes on her phone.
TikTok announced this week at Advertising Week New York that it has created what it calls the TikTok Advertising Network, a collection of 400,000 apps — including 44 of the top 100 gaming apps in the United States — where advertisers can now extend their campaigns beyond the borders of TikTok itself. The network claims roughly one billion daily active users, a figure that would essentially double the reach available to marketers who had previously been confined to the platform's own billion-user audience.
The move puts TikTok in more direct competition with the established mobile advertising networks operated by Google and Meta, which have long offered advertisers the ability to follow consumers across the wider app ecosystem. For TikTok, which has built its advertising business on the particular alchemy of its algorithm and its creator culture, the expansion represents a bet that its targeting and creative formats will translate beyond the environment that spawned them.
The network announcement arrived alongside a flurry of features bearing the word "agentic," which has become this season's preferred adjective on the conference circuit. (Last year it was "generative." The year before, depending on whom you asked, it was either "metaverse" or "retail media.") TikTok's new tools include artificial intelligence agents designed to guide users through shopping experiences and complete purchases without leaving an app, part of a broader effort to compress what the industry has long called the marketing funnel into something rather more instantaneous.
Isobel Sita Lumsden, global head of business marketing at TikTok, described the offerings as meeting advertisers where they already are: under pressure from chief financial officers to prove that their spending produces measurable returns. Sixty-eight percent of TikTok's advertisers, she said, now use the platform's built-in artificial intelligence tools.
The announcements come at a moment of considerable momentum for TikTok, at least by its own accounting. The company published a report last week claiming it had helped generate $81 billion for American businesses, and a separate survey by Kantar ranked it as the platform where marketers most intend to increase spending next year.
Ms. Lumsden said 84 percent of brands now advertise on TikTok, though she noted there remained ample room for growth, particularly in what she called "unpenetrated verticals" like travel and finance.
Whether a network of 400,000 apps can replicate the strange magic of a platform built on lip-syncing and memes remains, of course, to be seen.
Original story published in The Drum: "TikTok Ad Network launches, alongside slate of agentic features | The Drum"