Following closely behind Meta’s recent moves to automate SMB ad campaign creation, TikTok announced this week that it’s doing similar. The social giant will let advertisers automate campaign components – from images to headlines, ad copy, and behind-the-scenes audience targeting.
This has become a bit of a theme in social marketing and, broadly speaking, any promotional tools offered to SMBs. We’ve seen similar moves from Amazon, Google and others to streamline campaign creation workflows. This is one of AI’s well-placed applications as it tackles common SMB pain points.
Back to TikTok, its latest move addresses several of the above campaign automation functions, with the additional twist of video production… it is TikTok after all. Known as TikTok Symphony, it’s an AI suite for marketers to write scripts, produce video, and even enhance the multimedia they already have.
TikTok-Ready
One of the hallmarks of TikTok’s new creative suite is its “Symphony Creative Studio,” which can generate TikTok-ready videos with just a few inputs from a given business. Those inputs can include product images, logos, and other fodder such as a company motto or desired campaign theme.
Meanwhile, the “Symphony Assistant” sits alongside the creative studio to help SMBs come up with scripts, titles, captions, and other text-based components. Staying true to the “assistant” function that it advertises, the tool also provides recommendations on best practices for video production.
In that way the assistant can serve as an inspirational tool when SMBs are starting with a blank slate. For example, it can display some of the themes and styles that are currently trending on TikTok. This market research could eventually go beyond campaign inspiration to the broader benefit of product inspiration.
All of these functions trace back to a key term noted above: TikTok-ready. With recommended best practices and the finished videos themselves, the idea is to optimize the work for the “language” of TikTok. As we’ve examined, there is a specific style and tone that defines the ethos of TikTok.
In that light, part of this latest AI suite from TikTok can help brands enhance their existing videos to better align with the app’s evolving standards and languages. And lastly, all of the above is further propelled by automated tools to optimize campaigns, including goals, budgets, and audience targeting.
Trendspotting: Google and Amazon Launch GenAI Product Images
Common Theme
Stepping back, this move carries a common theme in social and other local digital marketing. Amazon and Google have offered various flavors of automation to generate campaign images, which goes a long way in democratizing an advanced function, at least relative to the average SMB’s graphic design chops.
And more recently, Meta rolled out a series of tools to streamline campaign creation, as noted. Like the above moves from TikTok, these included image generation (a common feature among all these moves) as well as other dreaded tasks in campaign creation such as headlines, copy, and targeting parameters.
AI and the broader concept of automation continue to be thrown at everything, but it will stick better to some things than others. As we’ve argued, automating rote aspects of SMB marketing, while freeing up time-starved SMBs to do other things, could be a winner. Of course, it will also come down to execution.
