In a world where attention is the ultimate currency, every second counts. Audiences consume a lot of content from advertisers, and only the most compelling creative breaks through the noise. Brands are not only competing with other ads, they are competing with every other piece of creativity.
TikTok call this “creative fatigue” – when audiences become overexposed to ads, causing diminished attention, sentiment, and long-term brand-building potential.
But good creative fights this fatigue and, crucially, drives results for brands. To put this to the test, TikTok teamed up with advertising research leader System1 to conduct a two-part series of industry-first research: Understanding Creative Fatigue and Global Impactful Entertainment. The research explores how audiences are engaging with short form creative and how marketers’ approaches need to evolve and adapt to achieve the biggest impact.
On TikTok, creativity pays
TikTok is a world unlike any other where culture moves fast, and creativity fuels real-world impact. On TikTok, audiences are highly active and focussed. Ads don’t take years to reach the highest level of effectiveness – the difference between engaging a potential customer or not can be seconds.
50% of a campaign’s success is down to the power of the creative. The best ads push creative boundaries, experimenting with story arcs and fresh creative hooks, jumping on trends, unfolding storylines and being vulnerable. Creativity works best when it blends empathy with entertainment.
Creativity isn’t risky – it’s essential. Brands confidently investing in genuine creativity see both immediate impact and sustainable growth. And creative which prioritises emotion does even better. Ads which build higher levels of emotion (4 & 5 Star Ads) are far more effective at building brand, including 1.7 x higher ad recall lift, 2.5 x higher awareness lift and 2.9 x higher association lift.
And TikTok turns this into measurable business impact. New supporting research in partnership with Newton X found that TikTok has an average of 7.4/10 for its potential to deliver long-term impact on their brand. Marketers view TikTok as unique in reaching more loyal audiences and keeping them engaged is driving lasting conversions.
Creativity is the road to delivering real impact. TikTok’s point of view is clear: Creativity isn’t just compatible with ROI; it’s the primary driver of it. Brands that embrace genuine creativity aren’t gambling – they’re strategically unlocking measurable long-term business growth.
– Sofia Hernandez, Global Head of Business Marketing and Commercial Partnerships, TikTok
So, how can brands make better, more creative ads that ultimately drive the bottom line? Enter the new rules for marketers:
1) First impression is everything
Gone are the days where advertisers can or should bombard users with bad ads to drive effectiveness through volume. High frequency cannot save poorly performing ads. On short form video, high-quality creative from the outset defines a campaign’s success.
Entertaining ads see more effectiveness from the first impression and see less creative fatigue. 51% of TikTok users prefer brands that have a variety of content because it keeps things entertaining.
On TikTok, audiences have an active and focused attention, so that first initial exposure is critical. There are no second chances; audiences decide in a heartbeat whether the ad is worth engaging with or they carry on scrolling.
Great assets means greater effectiveness and uplift. Once you have a great creative idea, iterate it, adapt it and play on it to maximise the effectiveness. So, iterating upon a central concept can give brands the volume they need for a prolonged campaign, without having to come up with thousands of creative ideas.
2) Don’t be boring. Tap into joy, humour and happiness
Indifference blocks action – indifferent viewers don’t click, share, or talk. They simply do not care – this is the death knell of an ad’s performance.
The more funny, uplifting or even surprising an ad is, the more effective it will be. Ads that create happiness and surprise achieve +15% higher emotional intensity.
Joy and humour carry across multiple exposures and people love to watch and rewatch it. The research found that happiness sustains effectiveness and it sustains at heavy frequency at 2x the rate of surprise .
Ultimately,entertaining ads fatigue less, letting brands run the campaign longer or more often without wear-out.
3) Branding early is your superpower
There is a common misconception that branding early in an ad is bad thing. But early branding isn’t disruptive – it actually helps viewers engage, making the ad memorable from the start. Ads with Brand Recognition in the first 2 seconds generated 57% more happiness and achieved 19% less attention decay.
On TikTok, brands play an additive role in content. The more businesses brand in an interesting and additive way, early on and throughout, the more audiences enjoy the content and brands avoid creative fatigue. Content on TikTok experiences a 25% increase in brand choice when well-branded early.
This all generates higher ‘Return on Creative’
When brands adopt this approach, they can engage with different communities, participate in real-time trends and conversations, creating more opportunities for interaction.
On TikTok, where engagement often stems from emotional impact, metrics like brand lift, sentiment analysis and multi-touch attribution provide a more accurate picture of creative success.
And when brands master this, they can unlock more than just ROI. They can unlock powerful brand loyalty.
TikTok’s research with Newton X found that 65% of marketers report that TikTok excels in reaching high loyalty customers. This loyalty also then drives higher long-term spending and repeat purchases and that creativity and entertainment also creates passionate advocacy – 84% of loyal brand users will also advocate or recommend a brand to others.
Better creative doesn’t mean more work – TikTok have built the products to help you
TikTok is helping brands to be bold and create TikTok-first campaigns through a suite of tools and solutions aiming to help brands create at scale and achieve results.
- TikTok One: Your all-in-one TikTok creative platform. Access nearly 2 million creators on our new platform, discover top agency partners and leverage our creative tools. With TikTok One, all the resources needed to implement and scale a successful TikTok campaign are at your fingertips—with a single log-in.
- Symphony is a suite of generative AI solutions that elevates your TikTok content creation journey. With Symphony, everything from helping to write a script to producing a video and optimising assets is effortless and efficient—fueling business success with content that strikes a chord.
- Symphony Creative Studio is our generative AI-powered video generator. Creative Studio will speed up asset creation with new AI-enabled editing features and generate TikTok-fit videos from just a few inputs.
- Smart+ automates the performance advertising process across targeting, bidding, and creative to deliver the right ad to the right person to offer the best performance. Advertisers simply input their assets, budget, and targeting goals and Smart+ automatically creates or selects the best creative asset – utilizing TikTok Symphony, chooses the right audience, and puts the best ad in front of the right customer at the right time.
