TikTok’s global head of business marketing and commercial partnerships, Sofia Hernandez, recently passed five years at the business.  

To say a lot has changed in half a decade would be an understatement. She joined TikTok to bring the platform “to the industry” as a media channel for brands and CMOs, not just as a social media platform for consumers to watch short-form video, she tells Marketing Week during June’s Cannes Lions Festival.

“We needed to let the industry know there was this thing called TikTok,” she explains. 

“Over five years, quickly, [it] has evolved from ‘What is this thing?’ to ‘OK yeah, I get it,’” Hernandez adds on how CMOs interact with the platform.

For a while, many brands put TikTok in their “experimental budgets”, but are now treating it as a channel capable of driving measurable return on investment.  

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“What’s interesting is that’s the question we’re getting. CMOs are very focused on short-term value and ROI. They’re getting a lot of pressure to prove how their spend is netting return and the first thing they’re cutting is creativity – investment in creativity,” she says.  

With budgets down, some brands are questioning whether or not they should be investing as much in creators during this period of economic turbulence, Hernandez notes.

TikTok’s message to brands? “You cannot skimp on creativity. You have to lean in. And we’re going to make it easy for you,” she states. 

It’s fighting talk and appears to be resonating with the likes of Unilever, which is undergoing its own marketing transformation to shift half its marketing investment into social media and creators.  

Creators, Hernandez claims, have pretty much mastered “the next evolution of marketing”.  

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“What I’m trying to do is help brands understand what that means and what that is. And a big part of it is vulnerability. A big part of it is rooted in experimentation,” she explains. “Those are things that don’t feel safe to a brand.”  

While vulnerability is one thing brands may be worried about, other arguably bigger worries when it comes to the platform are safeguarding, data security and the platform’s standing in the US.  

Addressing the issues facing TikTok in the US, last month vice-president of global business solutions Khartoon Weiss described it as the “elephant in the room” during a press briefing. She claimed TikTok was “absolutely confident in a resolution”.  

A day later, President Trump signed an executive order giving TikTok a 90-day extension on its mission to find a US owner.  

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the extension would “ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure.” 

Brands are in a ‘state of evolution’

Social media has changed how brands show up and what their customers expect. The likes of Ryanair and Duolingo have shown the power of a different type of brand voice and regularly gain plaudits for their TikTok marketing. 

However, it’s not something all brands want – or should – do.  

“Brands are in this state of evolution right now where they know they have to act more like a regular person, like a creator,” says Hernandez.

From a brand safety perspective, she says TikTok wants to “make sure that when they post content on the platform, it’s next to safe content”.  

Comparing brand content on the platform to videos put out by a creator who might receive a mixture of hate comments and positive ones, Hernandez’s message to brands is it’s never going to be perfect.

“You have to be OK with getting a little backlash, but stick to it and then the supporters will come out,” she explains.

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She adds it’s an “ebb and flow” for brands, meaning they “have to experiment”.  

Unilever’s move to focus on influencers and social media is “not a surprise” to Hernandez.

“Brands are starting to lean in. Especially the larger ones are starting to realise that they have to make bolder decisions about how they’re connecting with audiences,” she states. “So, for Unilever to make a choice to really invest half of their budget into creators, I think is a brilliant option.” 

However, emphasising the importance of experimentation.

“Maybe it’s just for the next year, right? And that’s OK. Brands need to be very comfortable experimenting with how they use their budgets,” says Hernandez.

“But what I will say is the way that we plan media in the past, if anyone’s still doing it that way, then they’re not set up for success, because things are happening in real time.”

Brands that perform well on TikTok are paying attention to their content constantly, she stresses.

Internal evolution

TikTok is “very non-traditional” with how it evolves, says Hernandez, and has applied this same ethos to its internal operations. 

While the business started “traditionally” in terms of how it built its teams, TikTok has since moved away from siloed ways of working. 

“We experiment a lot internally,” she explains.

For example, if the business is looking at how it shows up at an event externally, it would bring together different teams rather than “keep them in their individual silos” to move with agility.  

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Team structures are something Hernandez talks “a lot” about to CMOs and she suggests many are bogged down in silos. How, she asks, can businesses “show up as one brand” when the teams “fractured”?

“Big marketing organisations are so fractured that you have a branding team and you have a social team, and you have a digital team that’s different from the social team, and you have a PR team,” says Hernandez. 

“What I love about what we do internally is we move very fast. Whether it’s putting products out to market, changing our messaging or changing our internal structures, because that’s how fast culture is moving, that’s how fast our audiences are moving, and that’s how fast the brands’ businesses are moving.”