Our honest position
We judge TikTok on
its own numbers.
Most agencies will tell you TikTok creates a “halo” - that running it makes your Meta and Google perform better through cross-channel lift. It is a good story, and it is the reason a lot of TikTok budget gets approved. We believed it too, so we checked it across our own portfolio.
We could not reliably find it. What often looks like a halo is a budgeting artefact: brands add TikTok during a growth period when spend is rising everywhere, then credit the improvement to the new channel. Control for that and the lift mostly disappears - though our sample is our own client base, not the whole market, so treat it as our experience rather than a law. Some accounts genuinely do show it - we've seen individual accounts where TikTok spend really did move Meta performance, and we said so to those clients. What the portfolio data changed was our confidence that it's a rule. It isn't, and it shouldn't be sold as one.
We're telling you this on our own TikTok sales page, which should tell you something about how we'd report on your account. So why run TikTok at all? Because it earns its place on its own numbers, not on a borrowed halo. Different audience composition, materially cheaper reach in most categories, and a creative format that surfaces winning angles faster than Meta does - angles you can then take to Meta. That's a real reason. It's just not a magic one.
Since 2021
Five years of platform changes, absorbed.
We started running TikTok ads in 2021, when most of the market still wrote it off as a teen app. That's five years of watching the platform rewrite the rules of what works - and building creative instincts you can't get from a case study deck. Our creative team is in-house and sits next to the media buyers, so what converts this week shapes what gets shot next week.
