If TikTok gets banned, who would the non-obvious winners be?
Lot of talk about TikTok potentially getting banned! As recently as Jan 24, the University of Wisconsin banned TikTok on school owned devices.
So instead of speculating on whether the ban will go through, the team at FERMÀT thought we’d share 2 non-obvious winners here (if it does):
Everyone says Instagram with their reels product will be the winner if TikTok gets banned. However, we think the bigger winner will be DTC e-commerce brands.
Why do we say this?
We have the privilege of meeting dozens of brands a week and learning about their customer acquisition strategies. The most common thing we hear is that brands are ‘trying to figure out tiktok, but it isn’t performing.’ In fact, on average, CPAs or ROAS are 3x worse than on Meta (anecdata), and it has been many months of trying to figure it out. In fairness, we have met 1 brand whose TikTok ROAS is better than Meta, but that is out of at least 100 others for whom the numbers are significantly worse.
However, what is true is the younger generation is spending time on TikTok.
So, if TikTok gets banned, and that cohort moves to Meta — the winner will be the DTC brand, who will now be able to use their higher efficiency ad system, to find and send ads to that cohort! Not to mention, with increased ad supply (from higher usage), there is a chance ad prices come down further.
Pretty interesting right?
The second winner is more of a social dynamic perspective. TikTok seems to be a place for people to quickly catch on to trends. The most likely place people will go after that that is highly trend/moment based is Twitter.
What do you think?