If the Supreme Court upholds a U.S. law that would prevent Chinese parent company ByteDance from selling TikTok by January 19, it would be bad news for the music industry, including the live events business – which is increasingly The more you rely on TikTok.
The court’s ruling, which could take days or even hours, will have significant ramifications for dozens of U.S. industries that rely on the site for marketing, including the live music business during one of its busiest marketing months. FanIQ CEO explains TikTok’s popularity among concert and festival marketers has grown significantly over the past two years Jesse Lawrenceas the events industry shifts to a content-based marketing model.
“The music industry is finally moving away from static lineup advertising and embracing storytelling and lifestyle content,” Lawrence said, noting that the company’s return on ad spend on TikTok is 15 to 20 times higher.
Lawrence said part of TikTok’s appeal is that the learning curve for posting and sharing ads on the platform is fairly simple. Customers fall into two categories: upper funnel, which essentially consists of new customers who know little (if anything) about the upcoming event, and lower funnel, where customers have already gained awareness and are about to make the final decision to purchase.
“Our whole approach is to match upper-funnel engagement with the content we create around the festival, based on user interests,” Lawrence said. These include using beauty and fashion content to generate leads for summer country music festivals, sneaker content for hip-hop festivals, or skateboarding and surfing content to market punk rock and action sports expos.
“Our videos have watch time trackers, so if someone watches the video for 15 seconds or more, the next video they will see has specific details about the festival and specific video instructions for conversions,” Lawrence said, meaning Purchase tickets. He later noted, “It’s just about understanding where your audience spends their time and showing them content on those platforms.”
A recent piece of content created by FanIQ for Oceanfront Festival details rapper Key Glock’s extensive sneaker collection, including an interview clip with the Memphis rapper.
“The film is being made available to fans through the festival’s account,” Lawrence said. “The whole idea is that we put content into paid (content) that feels very organic.”
Lawrence encourages his clients to use multiple social media platforms — Snap, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit and Spotify — for marketing campaigns, noting that each platform has a different audience.
Lawrence explained that FanIQ is one of the new systems that “aggregates the performance of each platform.” “We want to give them that access so they can easily see what’s working, do more where we’re seeing performance, and scale back where we’re not seeing performance.”
will franklin British marketing company Round said TikTok’s strength as a marketing platform for the live music business comes from its early success in helping artists become popular, starting with the release of “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X in December 2018. WAP” and “Savage” (used in countless dance videos by the platform’s contributors) made her the most streamed artist on TikTok that year and helped her headline several major festivals in 2021 including Lollapa Lusa.
Franklin also pointed out that fans are increasingly using TikTok to obtain event videos and content, and pointed out that the search volume of the UK’s Boomtown music festival soared from 29.5 million times in the month before the event to 266.8 million times during the music festival, which increased people’s Awareness of Boomtown Music Festival.
Many marketers were hoping TikTok would get a last-minute reprieve from the Supreme Court, but several news outlets covering the hearing reported that a majority of the court judges said they would not support overturning the current ban. Franklin said he believes YouTube Shorts will temporarily fill the void if the site is banned in the United States.
“I haven’t seen a huge budget shift from TikTok to YouTube, but many of my clients are trying it out and spending small allocations on different platforms in case they do need to make the switch,” Franklin explained. The hesitation comes from the fact that no other platform has as many Gen Z users as TikTok, but our assumption is that if the site is banned, its users will go elsewhere. All we can do at this point is guess what it might be. Which platform.
If the Supreme Court does not step in to save TikTok, it will be removed from U.S. app stores on January 19 but will still run on users’ phones, although software updates will not be pushed regularly to fix bugs and glitches. ByteDance may be able to keep the platform online for months after the deadline, but the company has not announced any contingency plans.
“We advise client partners to maintain a cautious but optimistic attitude and advise them to pause TikTok media spending starting January 18 to avoid any unforeseen investment complications.” Kerry McKibbinThe president/partner of advertising agency Mischief @ No Fixed Address added that if advertisers are worried about TikTok shutting down, they should familiarize themselves with short-form platforms on YouTube and Meta.
