🕺 TikTok’s wild ad-venture

Say "seamless" again.... Yesterday, TikTok hosted its first-ever "TikTok World" event to inspire brands and "TikTok For Business" clients to spend more ad bucks. TikTok is still the least trusted major social platform, and draws less than $1.3B in estimated annual US ad sales, versus $48B for Facebook and Insta. That’s why it introduced #seamless new marketing tools, including an automated system that matches advertisers with creators, better ad-targeting tools, and deeper insights on content reach. The Tok also intro'd new shopping features with partners like Shopify and Square.

• TikTok is becoming increasingly important to marketers. 71% of users believe the biggest trends start on TikTok. Think Aerie's viral leggings and KFC's Hot Chicken.
• It has hundreds of thousands of advertisers, up from just dozens in 2019. This year the share of users who saw ads on TikTok nearly doubled from last year, to 37%. Last year Chinese parent ByteDance saw its sales more than double from 2019.

Music with a great (algo)rhythm... TikTok had 55M users in January 2018. By December 2018, it had 270M+ users post-Musical.ly merger; a year later, it had 500M. This week TikTok announced it hit 1B+ monthly users, joining FB, Instagram, and YouTube in the elite Billion Social Club. Insta reached the 1B mark in 2018, eight years after launching; it took TikTok less than three. Meanwhile, Twitter and Snap still have fewer than 300M.

When all the pieces fit... Lego, the world’s largest toy biz by revenue, revealed it hit record sales and profits in the first half of this year. The family-owned Danish toy giant nearly went bankrupt in 2003 after lots of kids abandoned IRL toys for video games. But the pandemic boosted sales across the toy biz.

• Lego raked in a whopping $990M profit for the first half of 2021 — 1,000% more than Hasbro, the world’s No. 2 toymaker. Part of the reason:
• While Hasbro hiked prices because of the global supply crunch, Lego avoided Brickflation by building factories (#RealBricks) in its biggest markets.

Build a brick… Unlike Hasbro and Mattel, which sell huge catalogs of toys ranging from Nerf Guns and Play-Doh to Barbie and Hot Wheels, Lego built its entire business around humble plastic bricks. And recently it’s found new ways to expand the Lego life:

• Bricks for all: Lego adapted its bricks to audiences with nearly every interest imaginable, from Roman history to video games. It partnered with cultural giants like Marvel to boost popular appeal. Think Minecraft, Harry Potter, and Frozen Lego sets.
• The Lego-verse: By keeping its core brand simple, Lego laid the foundation for IRL extensions like Legoland theme park and Lego Stores staffed by “Brick Specialists.” It expects to open 174 new stores this year.

• Afford: Ford is committing $11.4B to build three US battery factories and an electric-truck plant. Its "biggest investment ever" is expected to create 11K jobs.
• Ceiling: Janet Yellen said the Treasury could run out of cash reserves if Congress doesn’t raise or suspend the federal borrowing limit by October 18.
• Alexa: Amazon unveiled an Alexa-powered home robot, a smart thermostat, and a wall-mounted echo at its hardware event yesterday.
• Gameflix: Netflix bought a video-game studio and rolled out five mobile games in Europe, as it bulks up its gaming-subscription ambitions.
• Due: The US says China is preventing its airlines from buying "tens of billions of dollars" worth of US-made Boeing airplanes.
• Entourage: Talent agency giant CAA, which reps everyone from Beyoncé to Meryl Streep, is buying rival big-shot ICM Partners.

• Earnings expected from Cintas and Herman Miller

Authors of this Snacks own shares of: Amazon, Snap, Disney, Shopify, Square, and Google

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