TikTok rewards creative throughput over targeting. We produce and rotate enough hooks per week to keep learning phase moving, with spark ads and creator whitelisting where the vertical allows it.
A different machine
On Meta and Google you buy an audience. On TikTok you buy attention, and who sees the ad is
decided almost entirely by how people behave in the first two seconds. Targeting options exist and
are largely ceremonial. The lever that moves the account is how many genuinely different openings
you can put in front of the model each week.
This changes what an agency has to be good at. A team organised around campaign management will
lose to a team organised around production, because the constraint is not the media plan. It is the
number of ideas that reach the platform.
Throughput as the plan
We plan in batches: a set of openings per week, produced against a written list of angles, shot
or edited in a format native to the feed rather than resized from a Meta asset. Creative that looks
like an advertisement is treated as a failure, not a style choice.
- Openings are written first and separately from the rest, because the first two seconds decide
whether the rest was worth making.
- Winners are re-cut rather than retired — new opening, same proof, different framing — which is
far cheaper than starting again.
- Losers are logged with a reason, so the same idea does not quietly return next month.
Learning, respected
TikTok's optimisation needs a run of conversions before delivery stabilises, and most accounts
damage themselves by editing budgets and audiences mid-learning in response to a bad morning. We
build structures that absorb early volatility, consolidate rather than fragment the conversion
signal, and leave things alone long enough for the numbers to mean something. Patience here is a
setting, not a temperament.
Which categories TikTok will actually take
TikTok's prohibited list is broader than Meta's and enforcement is faster and less negotiable.
Some categories are simply unavailable and we will say so rather than sell a test we expect to lose.
Others are available in some markets only, in which case geography decides the plan. The useful
version of this conversation happens before a production budget is committed, not after the first
batch is shot.
Where the platform is open — beauty, food, fitness, education, e-commerce, most consumer apps —
it is frequently the cheapest attention available anywhere, and the gap between a good and a bad
account is almost entirely creative.
Creators and spark ads
Where the category allows it, running ads through a creator's own post outperforms the same
footage from a brand account, because the format carries social proof an ad account cannot fake. We
handle sourcing, briefing and whitelisting. Where creator partnerships are not available for a
category regardless of what the media buying permits, we say that at the start — pretending
otherwise costs a month.
