Cannes Briefing: TikTok wants its ‘low key’ approach to the festival to cement it as a serious player

By Kristina Monllos

It was expected to be a tempered return after a two-year hiatus, given the current state of the world. But the many maskless faces, swanky cabanas and massive tents along the Croisette seemingly prove that the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is pretty much back to what it was pre-pandemic.

On the first day of the four-day-festival, Omnicom announced a newly stricken pact with Walmart. It’s expected to be the first of several e-commerce moves made by the media group at this year’s event. Meanwhile major companies like Pinterest, Spotify, Dentsu Creative (which announced here at Cannes that it’s merging its creative agencies to become an integrated network) and others have re-staked their claims down the road from the Palais.

With a closer look, it seems Meta’s rivalry with social media’s current golden child TikTok is playing out in real time at this year’s festival. On one end of the Croisette, TikTok has quietly launched its first presence to do the wheeling and dealing with the industry it has missed out on the last two years as well as partner with marketers and advertisers on a personal level. A little ways down the road, further from the Palais, Meta has returned in a similar force to years prior.

For its Cannes debut, TikTok has two spaces with several executive team members present. The first is a small cabana along the beach, where there’s space to make TikToks as well as public programming. The second is a seventh-floor apartment suite across the street, which serves as a quiet space for marketing and advertising executives to get some face-to-face time with the TikTok C-suite.

It’s a very different look from the lavish beach presences from the aforementioned companies, and certainly a far cry from the infamous Snapchat ferris wheel.

TikTok has borrowed heavily from the platform playbook, which often reads go big or go home, in its three years of existence. But its “low key” presence at this year’s festival, as Stuart Flint, head of global business solutions for Europe, puts it, is seemingly less about wooing festival-goers and more about positioning itself as a serious player in the social media stratosphere.

TikTok has been considered a rising challenger since gobbling up its fair share of ad dollars in mid to late 2020. Back then, the short-form video platform was pitching advertisers on the ideas that it was a brand-safe haven for advertisers, that its user base was growing at an astronomical rate and that it offered more flexible ways in which advertisers measure ads. Since then, TikTok has bolstered itself to became a staple item in marketing budgets, drawing interest from big names brands like Silk, Hollister and L’Oreal.

That being said, it’s curious that TikTok took a relatively low-key approach at its first Cannes Lions, given the app has proven itself valuable to marketers and advertisers. Meaning, many don’t need handholding through how the content creation process works.

Per Flint, TikTok’s presence at the industry’s …read more

Source:: Digiday