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“Trending on TikTok” will appear on Vevo Pop, one of the FAST music channels.
TikTok will star in a new show on Vevo’s digital streaming network as part of a push by the social media giant to expand beyond mobile screens.
Vevo announced today that it partnered with TikTok to produce a weekly show, “Trending on TikTok,” which will feature prominently on its FAST network—“free ad-supported streaming TV.”
Vevo made the announcement at CES, which is running through the weekend in Las Vegas. Connected TV and streaming video is one of the top subjects at the electronics show, and TikTok has been making a push to jump from mobile screens to more TVs and out-of-home displays. On Thursday, TikTok made another announcement with a major connected TV player, IMDb, the movie and TV site owned by Amazon. TikTok users will be able to link to their favorite movie and TV pages on IMDb.
TikTok is using its cultural cache to partner with companies in music, entertainment, and other genres, said Kevin McGurn, Vevo’s president of sales and distribution.
“Music videos are one extremely large genre that has a tremendous amount of historical crossover between linear TV and digital,” McGurn said in a phone interview this week. “But there’s lots more, as well sports, or anything that really trends on TikTok.”
For Vevo, the deal could help bolster its advertising fortunes.
“Trending on TikTok” will run up to an hour-long 15 times throughout a given week, and play multiple times on Vevo Pop, one of the main FAST channels from the music video company. The show will highlight the top TikTok videos around the most popular songs. TikTok, which is owned by Chinese-based ByteDance, has garnered a reputation for generating viral sensations; it has helped propel music to the top of the charts, and it’s catapulted new products into e-commerce success.
Vevo has broad distribution on platforms, including Roku, Hulu and Amazon’s Freevee. Vevo has been talking with TikTok about working together on shows since the middle of last year, according to JP Evangelista, senior VP of content, programming and marketing at Vevo.
“The first thing that came to mind, that really jumped off the page for us, was doing something that involved bringing them to the TV screen,” Evangelista said, “allowing them to use our FAST network, and the value that we’ve really developed on TV.”
The TikTok show could become a major selling point in Vevo’s upfront sales pitch this year, which starts around May, when streaming media and TV companies secure ad commitments from major brands.
“Our big thing is to try to build out a content slate, this is one of the biggest pieces of it as we go into the upfronts,” McGurn said. “And we’ve been told by the agencies and advertisers that this is how they prefer to buy. They want anchor tenants of ownership when it comes to programming blocks. And then they want tonnage, more reach that they can get through a broader spectrum of inventory, and ratings points that they’re looking to be guaranteed on a given demographic.”
Vevo sets the ad prices for commercials and sponsorship packages on its programs, rather than selling ads at auction in an open programmatic environment, McGurn said. Vevo is not paying TikTok for the content it will use to generate the show, McGurn said.
TikTok has a big presence at CES, too, stationed at the Aria Wedding Chapel, a central location. Ahead of CES, Dan Page, TikTok’s head of global distribution and partnerships, hinted to how the company was focused on expanding the brand to more screens as part of its connected TV strategy. TikTok has a connected TV app, which is found on platforms such as Amazon’s Fire TV, Android, Samsung, LG and other services.
“There are 2 billion additional screens across the world, outside of mobile,” Page said in a pre-CES podcast in November, “our aim is to bring that entertainment experience to those screens.”
TikTok views the partnership as a way to “expand that experience beyond the platform, supercharging the discovery process and celebrating the community’s favorite songs and artists,” Page said in the announcement on Thursday.
In this article:
Garett Sloane is Ad Age’s technology, digital and media reporter. He has worked in newspapers from Albany to New York City, and small towns in between. He has also worked at every advertising industry trade publication that matters, and he once visited Guatemala and once rode the Budapest Metro.