How TikTok Changed Ads Forever

For years, brands have been battling for audiences that actually pay attention. Then Tik Tok arrived and it created a new form of content, short and addictive. So, how did Tik Tok actually create a format that all the other platforms seem to follow as well just because it works so well? From YouTube shorts to Instagram reels, like every single platform is just copying their style and building their content engine based on this blueprint. So, in this video, I'm going to break down exactly how Tik Tok changed advertising forever, altered the human brain, and I'm going to show you how to create short form content that actually converts in this new world. Let's get straight into it. So, before Tik Tok, you had a very siloed social media landscape. Every single platform had its own nature, its own style. You had YouTube for long form. You had Instagram for polished content that you could actually consume in a I would say reasonable way. You had Facebook which was to uh be inside groups or just interact with the community that you're a part of and you were kind of empowered as the user to decide what you wanted to watch. Now when Tik Tok arrived, it literally flipped that model on its head. The for you page kind of became like the entry of a maze. You entered through it and it was built based off of all the data that they had on you to basically alter the experience and make it so pleasurable that it became so addictive for so many people. And so the algorithm started deciding what you were watching. So picture this. Every single swipe became a hit of unpredictable dopamine. And with each swipe, you were literally training your brain to become like a slot machine. Now, some people might argue, hey, this was even the case back when Facebook introduced notifications. Sure, but it's not the same impact. The amplitude this time is magnified, and Tik Tok changed the game forever just because they turned the dial 100 times faster um than all the platforms before them. And so, in essence, what happened is that Tik Tok made unpredictability the core of entertainment. And so, in practicality, what happened is that if you did not play by the rules, you weren't even in the game to start with. And so inevitably people started focusing on hooks. People started focusing on, hey, how can we grab attention for as long as possible and engineer our creatives, our content so that we retain as many eyeballs as possible to get rewarded by the algorithm. It was this gold rush of really just going after the attention and forever altering the ad landscape, if you will. And so honestly, when I was thinking about this video, I remembered all the ads that we used to run back in the days before Tik Tok even popped uh in culture. And essentially, all of those ads were, you know, they were cinematic, they were staged, they were slow, slow paced, like the pace was actually so much slower than what you see today. And honestly, just it it's just natural selection. In a landscape like the one that we have today, those pieces of content don't have time to shine. They don't have a place to exist. It's a dopamine-driven feed. It's a dopamine-driven experience. And if you're not a merchant of dopamine, you're just not going to make it. Now there's another angle that's really interesting is that there's not only negatives because you know Tik Tok uh really altered the way people consumed content for sure but it also altered the relationship people had with content which is we go from a televised like high production um you know philosophy to now going into a raw like really intimate real experience right where you're actually connecting with the creator because there's just the screen and there's no huge production backing the content there's no um you know scripting everything is just raw and authentic and the platform rewarded authenticity and not high production. So, think about it. Messy backgrounds, blurry clips, unprofessionally cut clips, um not really edited in a way that's, you know, pleasing to the eye, whatever, just, you know, scrapped together. That's the content that really popped on screen that reflected the need in the marketplace for such authenticity because people are just so used and so sophisticated when it come to the high production uh value that other platforms had and were running on. Another thing happened that's really interesting. UGC creators uh became literally the new ad agencies essentially. They were the driving selling vector um that a lot of brands were using in on Tik Tok. And so when other brands were seeing it or other platforms were seeing that um really pop off on Tik Tok, it prompted them to do the same and encourage the same behavior. And that's when every single platform started copying Tik Tok because authenticity sold more than aesthetics. And so now it's a unified playground. You see this with every single platform. YouTube started pushing shorts. Instagram did amazing with reals. Um you know Facebook as well, Snapchat, all these platforms copied Tik Tok's model. And you can even see it with LinkedIn. Um and nowadays it's starting to move in the same direction because people are expecting fast hooks, fast information delivery. They don't have time. They have short attention spans and they don't have any patience.

So they don't want to be sitting there listening to you for 2 minutes. No, they need 10 seconds of value and then they're out. So now, like I said, it's all about unpredictable pacing, strong emotional hooks, and emotion-driven storytelling. That's what really drives attention. And in a landscape where attention is rare, and you want to capture as fast as possible, that's the recipe that you want to replicate throughout the entire content ecosystem that you're building for your brand. If you're running a brand or you're running ads on behalf of brands, that's what you want to do, okay? You want to focus on that because every single platform is copying the model. And you might ask why. Well, it's because they all compete for more users. They want to have so many users that are active that it it's just the nature of business essentially. So to succeed today, there's a race which is the attention race and you want to win it as fast as possible. What you need to understand is that your content should feel native to the short form culture. You want your content to just blend in with culture and blend in with what people see natively on the platforms so that you don't feel like an ad. So that's what you need to do if you want to succeed in this landscape. It's a very fastmoving landscape. So I've got something special for you today. I want to share with you what I call the modern ad formula. I want to share with you the recipe that we use so that we create short form content that actually sticks uh and that actually converts. There is going to be five steps. I'm going to detail all of them and hopefully you get some value out of this. So step number one, you guessed it, it's the hook. You want to hook the brain. Now there's different ways to do it. A lot of people just feel as though there's only one way to do it, which is with the words that are spoken on the video, and that's false. You can have a pattern interrupt, which is a hook. Essentially, that's what you want when it comes to the hook. You want it to interrupt a pattern of scrolling. And you can do that with sound. visually. So just with the visual cues or the visual elements in the video. And you can also do that with words, of course. Um, the most common one is just having a hook, uh, a headline or a hook that's catchy and that really intrigues, right? Because you're building emotion, but it can just be a sound effect. You see all these ASMR, for example, like the cooking videos where you see just a person like opening a can of Coke or opening some kind of box and the sound just creates, I would say, an intriguing emotion that you feel when you see it and it prompts you to watch the video. And these videos like they have amazing retention and there's a reason for that, right? And so don't limit your hook to being just about the words you say, okay? Cuz that's only one avenue that you can go with it. There's the sound and there's the visual, right? So think about your colors. Think about, you know, special effects. Think about just like literally carrying something that's um you know, funky uh that you have that's colorful, for example, and that pops on screen. That works as well. Um but that's the first step, the hook. Next thing, so once you've hooked your customers, next thing you want to do is you want to maintain that attention. You've gained the attention for literally, I don't know, one, two seconds, you want to maintain it for as long as possible. And so every 1 to two seconds, you want something new to happen. Again, that could be sound, it could be visual, or it could be the words that you're saying. So, think about this as changing the pacing of the video, introducing a new element that's visual, uh introducing a new actor or someone that's, you know, saying something else, or just introducing an angle shift where you're showing, I don't know, some B-roll or you're showing like a different angle of the uh of what you're showing in the video. Just something that will continue hooking the customer. And I need you to think of it this way. Every single second or every single frame needs to be leading to the next one. The only objective of your frame is to lead to the next one. That's how I think about it personally and it's to produce some amazing videos with amazing retention just because we're putting this into practice essentially, right? And the goal is to maintain the attention as long as possible. Step number three, very simple. Just talk like a human honestly. That's as simple as it gets. Just don't be uh don't be a brand speaking to customers, right? People don't like to be patronized or shown that they're, you know, being sold to, right? Just be a human. talk in a raw authentic way. Build authenticity, real authenticity within your creative and your creative will do better than just like uh sitting there with an artificially created script that just doesn't speak to your customers and there's this weird dynamic going on and it rarely brings any ROI doing that, right? So, build authenticity within your creative. The way to do it, very simple. You want to show flaws. that it's real. So, real results. If you're demonstrating something and you're saying something that claims your product is doing does XY Z, you want to show it. You want to show that it's real. You want to show that you don't have five stars with like 4. 7 for example. There's some nuance, right? Life is nuance and there should be nuance in your script as well and the way you're selling, right? If you're selling me, you know, the cure for cancer, for example, uh and that's, you know, a metaphor for your product, I'm just not going to believe you, right? And you need to make it believable by building authenticity. Okay. Step number four is to reward emotion. I don't care what your creative does, it needs to evoke an emotion. Whether that's laughter, stress, um desire, it can be

recognition, it could be um you know just a feeling of uh ease, a feeling of stress if you need to do that. So essentially what your creative does is it invokes the emotion because humans will tend to act on emotion and justify the action with logic. So logic rarely comes before the emotion. Like think of it. If you're going to buy an expensive pen or an expensive shoe or an expensive watch, you're probably buying it out of emotion and you're probably going to justify that by looking at your bank account or just telling yourself that, hey, um it's going to be okay or just reassuring your partner, whatever you want to do. Um and the logic comes after, right? Usually it comes after. So what you want to do is you never want to speak to the logic. appeal to the logic just because it's boring honestly. And so you always want to invoke an emotion because then it prompts an action. Which brings me to step five, which is lead with clarity. If your call to action to me is shop now, but also click on this link and do this and do that and send a DM and all that stuff. It it's just confusing, right? We need a clear call to action because now you've done your job correctly. You've got you've built a strong hook. You've maintained the dopamine flow with consistent pacing and a lot of different, you know, moving parts in the video and you've maintained as much attention as possible. And you've also built authenticity. You've evoked emotion through your video. Now, it's time to cement that with a proper call to action. And how you want to think of it is frictionless. You need to be guiding your customers with that with the least friction possible uh for it to be a success. You can go from step one to step four with no mistakes. if you don't have a good call to action. Honestly, you can literally break a winning ad. Okay, so it's very important that you finish strong. So, finally, Tik Tok did not just change marketing. It literally changed the way people consume information. And that's a big thing. It compressed attention and made every single second count. So, if you take anything from this video, let it be this. The best ads today aren't about looking perfect. They're about feeling real. So, if your content can hook the brain, maintain the dopamine, build authenticity, and close off strong, and build trust, you'll win every single time. I'll see you on the next one.