4 Marketing Lessons from TikTok’s Creative Library

This summer, TikTok announced the official rollout of its creative Commercial Content Library. In a way, it’s similar to Meta’s Ad Library Tool, in that it gives advertisers access to a library of ads published on the platform. Not only is this great for marketing intel but it also sheds light on what type of ad performs the best.

TikTok, as part of the media mix, is a compelling channel to gain incremental reach across your target audience. Although Connected TV and YouTube are in most Americans’ homes, TikTok commands nearly 95 minutes of daily average usage. Combine that with a primarily younger audience (41% of users are between 16 and 24 years old) and cost-effective CPMs, you have a great option to support any top-of-funnel efforts. It’s also a solid channel for “discoverability.” The search function is a starting point for some prospective students, and search ads are now part of the ad types media planners have to use. 

When going through the pages of creative, the inventory diversity surprised me the most. There isn’t a predominant mode of creative delivery—especially as it relates to performance. This means there’s a large creative canvas from which to pull for a paid approach and the ways you may align paid and organic. 

To help higher education marketers plan for the platform, I’ve pulled out four key takeaways from reviewing pages of creative across the higher education vertical. 

‘Unpolished’ Doesn’t Alway Mean Ineffective

Producing ads that look and feel native to a medium isn’t new. Examples can be found even before the lithograph. As with terms like engagement, there’s a tendency to reduce the direction of marketing and communications to authenticity. Being authentic is considered a best practice, and even TikTok advises: “Be more authentic with an unpolished aesthetic.” 

The trouble with terms like engagement and authenticity is that they are hard to define and even harder to measure. Even more interesting, a person could argue that what is authentic or inauthentic can perform similarly on the platform. I was surprised to find that there wasn’t a dominant version that was considered a top performer across the education category. 

An ad from Marist College, which one might argue is more polished, performed nearly identical to Arkansas State’s influencer-style ad. If you hang around long enough in the tool, you will see this pattern play out across multiple ad types.

For higher education marketers this means that creative strategies should be considered, not only as they relate to the platform but also the entirety of the marketing mix. If TikTok is used to achieve reach, start with the output first—what you want your audience to take out of the message—before execution. 

Next, determine how TikTok Creative may prime your audience or complement other components of the prospective student journey. Once you determine those, proceed to determine the best way to express either outcome.

Breakthrough with Sound

Teens aren’t just spending more time with TikTok; the majority are consuming content with the sound on. This provides advertisers with an opportunity to use sound strategically. The strength of audio rests in capturing and maintaining attention, as well as creating a heightened emotional response. 

It’s easy to get through production and then grab something easy from PremiumBeats. Instead, take the time to consider how sound can be used to either pace or quickly create a connection to what is unfolding visually. 

This Butler University ad starts with a quick build and then maintains a pulsing rhythm along with the narrative arc—a textbook illustration of using sound to maintain attention. The payoff is that audiences spent much more time with the ad than most.

Frontload Your Message

What’s also interesting about this tool is you can explore how each ad was attended to over a period. As it relates to time, the predominant pattern is that most attention (i.e., time spent with the ad) and clicks occur before the 3-second mark. This aligns with most research on ad effectiveness. 

Frontload your story arc to increase the effectiveness of your TikTok ads. Immediately establish a sense of place and focus for the narrative. If a person is the focus, create an immediate connection with your audience through tight shots and a single core message. This shouldn’t limit creativity but rather encourage a focus on what should matter most when it comes to your communication objectives. 

This Cal Poly Humboldt ad establishes the brand quickly and uses layered scenes to establish place and link to the primary message all within the first few seconds. This is a smart way to frontload the ad.

Packaged for Products

An often-attributed Marshall McLuhan quote goes, “We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.”

TikTok, like most social media, has had its own aesthetics and creator content themes emerge to drive a more product-centric platform (i.e., “holy grails”). Highlands College employs many of these devices, and the results have put them in the top 5% of ads, as it relates to click-through rate.

In the case of the Highlands College ads, there’s a “brand” version that adopts one element of product demos: “Stop Scrolling.” There’s also another version that is taken straight from an influencer’s content playbook. 

This gives higher education marketers insight into an interesting approach for planning across the entire funnel. One approach is to use a creative element to grab attention quickly (i.e., Stop Scrolling) and drive a brand message. Then, you can use a more targeted approach to drive action (i.e., clicks or conversions) by using a product-centered approach. 

No matter the platform or channel, advertising success relies on getting attention and being remembered. What ad libraries now effectively give higher education marketers is a real-life establishment of best practices. Like all best practices, they come with the caveat of “it depends.” 

For those who are just getting started using TikTok as part of your paid media mix, this can be a great way to establish your guide of best practices based on what you are observing across the industry. For those who’ve developed a paid presence, this can be a way to gauge future creative strategies based on category performance.