Brands Look at TikTok After App Begins Monetising in India in Nov

Since last November, TikTok started to showcase its product to Indian brands.

(Photo: The Quint)

As the ban on the Chinese video app was lifted by the courts in India in late April, TikTok is becoming an up-and-coming platform for Indian consumer brands for advertisements.

Since last November, the company started to showcase its product to Indian brands and online retail store Voonik was the first to the use TikTok as an advertising platform, as reported by ET Tech.

After Pepsi, E-commerce sites – Myntra, ShopClues, Snapdeal, Voot – and education start-ups like Masterclass started using it too.

Head of Ad Sales and Customer Support for ByteDance (Tik Tok's owner) India, Sachin Sharma, told ET Tech that the video app has users even from the most remote towns in India.

“For marketers, this translates into easily reaching an audience that was harder to tap otherwise.”

Sachin Sharma, Head of Ad Sales and Customer Support, ByteDance India

'Brand Takeovers'

A new advertisement format – ‘Brand Takeover’ – was launched by TikTok that lets the brands show full length vertical display and 'In-feed Native Video', that allows an interactive format, as reported by ET Tech.

Brand Consultant Harish Bijoor said that the app is a potent combination of audio, video, music and irreverence. As from Bijoor’s point of view, brands “don’t care about controversies, they only care about eyeballs.”

According to Bijoor's estimation, TikTok users in rural India use the app for an average 106 minutes per day. He also said that engagement on TikTok is higher than that on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

The Madras HC had called for a ban on TikTok on 3 April, owing to reports of pornographic content being accessible to minors on the platform. The app was then removed from Google Play Store and Apple App Store after a couple of days.

Brands Meet Audience

Voonik, an online retailer, is finding its target audience of 18-35-year-old matches on TikTok.

“Voonik and TikTok have a coinciding target audience. It made right sense for Voonik to target TikTok’s young and super-active crowd, which follows fast fashion.”

Prem Suganth VT, Associate Director,  Voonik

(With inputs from ET Tech)