There was a time, not so long ago, when the marketing funnel was a tidy metaphor: awareness at the top, consideration in the middle, purchase at the bottom, and everyone stayed in their proper lane. Brand marketers and performance marketers occupied different floors, sometimes different buildings, and regarded each other with the polite suspicion of neighboring fiefdoms.
TikTok, the short-form video platform owned by ByteDance, would like to collapse that arrangement entirely.
At the Cannes Lions festival last week, Isobel Sita-Lumsden, TikTok's global head of business marketing, made the case that the old distinctions between discovery and commerce, between entertainment and advertising, are becoming relics. "I think marketers should stop thinking in traditional brand versus performance," Ms. Sita-Lumsden said. "Think about how you can connect discovery to action in real time."
The platform also introduced Symphony Agent, an expansion of its artificial intelligence creative tools that is meant to streamline the process of making advertisements that look and feel native to TikTok. (The industry's current enthusiasm for the letters A and I shows no signs of abating, at Cannes or anywhere else.)
Ms. Sita-Lumsden was careful to position the technology as an assistant rather than a replacement. "The human side of strategy is always going to be there," she said, adding that "the biggest marketing skill that becomes more valuable because of AI is creativity."
Perhaps more significant than the AI announcement was TikTok's continued push to reframe how marketers think about audiences. Rather than planning campaigns around traditional demographics — age, income, geography — the platform wants brands to organize around communities and culture, a distinction that sounds modest but implies a rather different approach to media buying.
Ms. Sita-Lumsden cited L'Oréal, Duracell, Dr Pepper and Virgin Voyages as brands that have successfully embedded themselves in creator culture rather than simply advertising adjacent to it. "The ones that are early adopters, playful and willing to take a risk are the ones that succeed," she said.
Whether this represents a genuine shift in how marketing works or simply how TikTok would prefer marketing to work remains, as always, a matter of perspective.
Original story published in The Drum: "Forget demographics, TikTok wants marketers to chase communities | The Drum"