Author: Antoinette Siu

Is there such a thing as over-preparing? It certainly feels that way in the case of TikTok’s ban, which has been playing out in the U.S. for months since its initial January 2025 deadline following legislation signed by former President Joe Biden in April 2024 requiring the ByteDance app to sell to a U.S. owner or get shut down. After January, President Trump signed a 75-day extension for TikTok to work out a deal.

This time around, eight agencies and influencer marketing execs told Digiday that their general sentiment going into the April 5 deadline this weekend is more calm and confident. That’s because they’ve had months of practice and data gleaned from the temporary outage on Jan. 18, while some are more sure that a deal or extension is likely to go through by this deadline. Some advertisers like Coca-Cola and Comcast have even increased their spend on the platform this year, as Digiday previously reported this week.

“We’re worn down a little bit by the drama,” said Joanna Fowler, head of talent at Shine Talent Group. “We’re ready to just … move into the action phase, [which includes] building on another platform.”

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

,Read More

January’s TikTok outage has served as a wake-up call for brands, reinforcing the need to diversify their spending across multiple platforms to avoid over-reliance on a single channel.

That’s meant marketers have spent more on other platforms like Instagram and YouTube, both of which outpaced TikTok’s spend in the month following the platform’s Jan. 18 outage, representatives of influencer marketing companies Later, Collabstr, BENlabs and BrandCycle told Digiday.

Although major advertisers such as Unilever are upping their spending on influencer marketing — and some brands are continuing to increase their spending on TikTok — influencer marketers see this trend as evidence that brands are still hedging their bets around TikTok marketing amid the uncertainty surrounding the platform’s potential U.S. ban.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

,Read More