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It is said that the ugliest sound in the world is the tick tock of a clock because it tells you time is passing, never to come back again. It is the one thing we cannot get more of, or get back.

Mark Zuckerberg would agree. But the relentless TikTok that pains him is that of the eponymous Chinese social media giant. Launched only five years ago, TikTok is one of the world’s fastest-growing social media platforms. Sensor Tower in its “Q1 2022: Store Intelligence Data Digest” reported TikTok as the top app by worldwide downloads in Q1 2022. The app previously had surpassed 3.5 billion all-time downloads in the first quarter of 2021, becoming just the fifth app (and the only one not owned by Meta) to achieve this milestone.

Since the start of 2022, TikTok has been downloaded more than 175 million times. TikTok has surpassed 10 million downloads for the past nine quarters now. No app has had more downloads than TikTok since the beginning of 2018.

This is significant for two reasons: Firstly, this stellar performance has punched the entrenched Silicon Valley social media giants in the nose and they are bleeding. Secondly, TikTok is seen as a danger to those who see the business as an extension of China’s new internet ambitions. It is an indication of the finesse with which China players can deal in such areas. The followership, brand appeal and gush of content has left everyone awe struck.

TikTok might be the easiest social act to be a part of but lurking under the simple interface is bleeding edge Artificial Intelligence which adapts and adopts content at a blinding pace. No wonder TikTok signed up its first 1 billion users double as fast as arch-rival Facebook.

In America, the average TikTok user, on a daily basis, spends 50 percent longer on the app than the typical user spends on Instagram. Powered by such reach and engagement, advertising revenues have surged. TikTok’s revenues are expected to reach $12 billion this year and $23 billion in 2024. Meta has been particularly hard-hit as tech stocks have taken a beating on flattish growth and privacy concerns and the firm is now seen as re-engineering its products to mimic TikTok.

But this success has raised a shrill alarm. There is continued scrutiny and concerns regarding the rise and rise of TikTok. What is the reason for such alarm?

The risk is privacy at minimum and national security at the other end of the danger spectrum. Simply put, China’s regime reserves the right to appropriate data from its companies. No one is exempt. Some have questioned these data concerns arguing that the average social user is unconcerned by privacy and most advertising models are based on companies reading data and usage. By this logic, the advantage of inside access is not new. Data is being analysed by all. How would it matter if it is one company or another?

They see TikTok as a publisher of harmless, even frivolous memes. Can world power be impacted by quirky dance moves?

But TikTok is not slapstick comedy and bad dancing alone. The bigger, material concern emerges with TikTok as an entertainment and news platform. TikTok is a news source for a quarter of all Americans and perhaps most of its youth. This deepens this sense of anxiety. The Chinese government actively meddles in domestic media; TikTok’s content creators are outside China, but the app’s algorithm is within Beijing’s sight. Given an adaptive, personalised feed, manipulation cannot be easily detected.



China knows that social platforms have clout particularly in electoral systems. It recently classified content-recommendation algorithms as a key technology. The commercial implications for TikTok’s competitors are dire. Facebook's entire business is based on tracking users to feed its advertising machine and it is rolling in cash. Last year alone, the company made $40 billion in profit. But the key issue is a growth slowdown. Meta’s market cap dropped $230 billion in one day-the most ever for a publicly traded company- on account of privacy-linked constraints to its model. Apple took a lead in this matter and raised the privacy bar. So, the western tech bloc is hardly an indivisible monolith advancing its interests.

TikTok’s success is not a fluke. The social media app cuts through with relevant trends, unique algorithms and a diverse set of communities for every niche subject matter. Recent updates include interactive add-ons for in-feed ads and its own AR development platform-Effect House. This has made Meta and smaller other players doubt their technical skills as pertinent to where consumers see value.

Despite being banned in India, which has one of the largest markets for app installs in the world, TikTok was ranked third overall in Asia. It was number one on the App Store. Looking at US overall downloads, TikTok has been the top app each quarter since Q1 2021. The last app to beat TikTok was Zoom in Q4 2020. Also, since Q1 2021, TikTok and YouTube have been the top two apps on the US App Store each quarter. TikTok was also the number one app on Google Play for the third quarter in a row, with installs up 19 percent year-over-year.

Starting with the Trump Administration, the United States is keen to box Chinese tech expansion. Be it TikTok or Huawei, they have moved proactively. Brendan Carr, one of the FCC's commissioners, shared - via Twitter - a formal letter written to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai in late June. The letter pointed to reports and other developments that made TikTok non-compliant with the two companies' app store policies.

"TikTok is not what it appears to be on the surface. It is not just an app for sharing funny videos or meme. That's the sheep's clothing," he said in the letter. "At its core, TikTok functions as a sophisticated surveillance tool that harvests extensive amounts of personal and sensitive data."

Carr's letter, written on FCC letterhead, said if the Apple and Alphabet do not remove TikTok from their app stores, they should provide statements to explain "the basis for your company's conclusion that the surreptitious access of private and sensitive U.S. user data by persons located in Beijing, coupled with TikTok's pattern of misleading representations and conduct, does not run afoul of any of your app store policies."

On July 16, it was announced that TikTok’s global chief security officer Roland Cloutier, who oversees cyber security, is stepping down from his role. TikTok has been reshuffling its global security team and moving China-specific security issues, including ring fencing it from ByteDance, to more localised teams. It recently announced a dedicated US data security team known as "USDS" as a gatekeeper for US user information, minimising China’s access to data. The company is discussing a structure under which the team would operate autonomously and not be under TikTok’s control or supervision. TikTok, whose leadership is based in the United States and Singapore, is considering rolling out similar data security teams in other regions.

It is estimated that 44 percent of TikTok’s American users are under 25 (compared with 16 percent of Facebook’s). That makes the video app a hugely desirable and influential platform. It is moving beyond User Generated Entertainment Content to shopping and news.

Still, TikTok is but one small corner of a large Chinese strategic canvas. The Chinese are building their own internet, in a potential fragmentation that has been called the “splinternet”, an alternative cyberspace. The Chinese version of cyberspace would be a completely different digital architecture, complete with its own ideological governance and values incompatible with our own. It would herald the beginning of a new cold war-style split, between an ‘open and free’ and ‘controlled and compromised’ internet.

Digital China, like all the country’s national-level strategies in general, is built on Communist Party decisions, objectives, missions, projects, and priority areas of action. ‘New Type Infrastructure’ is one of Digital China’s major missions, one of three focused specifically on developing core technologies. The New Type Infrastructure has three main directions — information infrastructure, integration infrastructure and innovation infrastructure. This is a major mission designed to support national informatization. It overlaps with two key focus areas, mastering core technologies and collecting cyber talent, from one of Digital China’s cornerstone strategies: To be a ‘Cyber Great Power’.

While the technical missions of Digital China are grand, the socioeconomic and geopolitical ambitions of Digital China are imperial in scope. This digital transformation encompasses digital economy, e-government, digital culture, smart society, and digital ecology.

The governance and control of data is a key focal point of Digital China. A new age Marxist economic system that had elevated data as the key factor of production joining labour, land, capital, and technology.

TikTok delights consumers and advertisers worldwide, but China’s regime cannot let surveillance and propaganda be beyond its limits of authority. How this will play out is a big deal for everyone.

In effect, TikTok is a test case for global business, global internet and global capitalism.

Shubhranshu Singh is vice president, marketing - domestic & IB, CVBU, Tata Motors. He writes Simply Speaking, a weekly column on Storyboard18. Views expressed are personal.

Note to readers: I'm intrigued by information such as that eight percent of the population is left-handed, that giraffes only sleep five minutes every twenty-four hours and so on which is useless but important! In the eighteenth century, German aristocrats kept glass-fronted cabinets which displayed curios. They called it Wunderkammern. This column is some such thing. In an unmarked field it is easy to wander… I want to open windows to glimpse views rather than a whodunnit or a how-to-do-it. I have a licence to be long or short. To be structured or abrupt. This column has no beginning, middle or end. It's a journey without a destination. Simply speaking...

Simply Speaking: TikTok is surging. For Meta or Verse

Marketing like other industries is going through sweeping changes brought on by big tech, medium tech, small tech and all kinds of technologies in between. Blockchain, artificial intelligence, machine learning, virtual reality, NFTs, metaverse, 3D printing and whatnot. It's a huge confluence of disruptive technologies called the Great Disruption. These tectonic shifts affect everything from how we socialize to how we sleep, with all-pervasive smart devices collecting an immeasurable amount of data on us 24x7.

To deal with these new realities, marketing and marketers need to up their game. According to one of the world's most influential CMOs, Raja Rajamannar, what brands need, in short, are da Vinci marketers.

But if you can't find a da Vinci marketing mind, build da Vinci marketing teams.

In an interview with Storyboard18's Delshad Irani, Rajamannar, who is the global chief marketing and communications officer of Mastercard, shares what he looks for in the next-generation marketing talent as we witness the great skills reset.

As we look forward to all these new technologies, you need to deal with them, you need to leverage them, which means you first need to understand what they are. So the kind of talent that we should be looking for is those people who either already know these subjects and technologies or they have the aptitude to learn them and an attitude to learn.

These technologies are not going to remain stagnant. They're evolving and transforming very rapidly. So you need to stay on the ball all the time and stay ahead of the curve, which means what are the significant qualities of new talent that we bring in is learning curiosity and learning agility. They should have the attitude that I need to learn. I need to stay ahead of the game.

2) The Leonardo  da Vinci marketer 

Typically, most of the people are either right-brained or left3-brained. So the left-brain ones are the ones who are more into technology, data, analytics systems, and experimentation. The right brain is about intuition, creativity, aesthetics, design, psychology and so on. Very rarely we will find people who are extremely good on both these hemispheres of the brain. They are the Leonardo da Vinci kind of people. If you find those people, pay them top dollar, get them into the company. It's an investment.

3) The da Vinci marketing team 

Now most of the majority of the team would not be of this calibre. So you create a da Vinci team. Which means you have people who are the traditional classical marketers who are fantastic, but give them enough training to be able to understand and speak the same language and ask the right questions. On the other hand, you have other folks who understand the technology and the data extremely deeply. But they don't see the rest of it. They need to be sensitised to aspects of psychology, the aspect of emotions, to the aspect of design. So you actually can find people who have the sensibilities of the other sphere but the deep expertise of the primary area that they actually focus on. You need to identify this kind of talent.

And then we have got those rare Leonardo da Vinci's - over-promote them, over-reward them, keep them in the company at whatever cost.

The Great Skills Reset: Are you a 'da Vinci marketer'?

Web3 is marketers’ shiny new toy. While there is enough excitement about the future of the internet in the marketing community, every brand maker is defining it differently. Future-ready advertising agencies think it is mainly because Web3 is still a work in progress. The right thing for marketers to do is to observe, learn, and use it in the right context and brief, advertising executives tell Storyboard18.

The premise of Web3, as per computer scientist Gavin Wood who coined the term, is simple. While Web1 opened up the internet, Web2 led to the birth of trillion-dollar technology companies which not only own a lot of infrastructure on the web but also have a lot of influence on users, their content, and above all their data. They dominate the web. Web3 is a truly decentralized version of the internet where users will have control, giving them the upper hand. And blockchain is a key technology behind Web3.

Wood, who is one of the co-founders of Ethereum and founder of blockchain infrastructure company Parity Technologies, thinks Web3 ideally will make users trust how their data is being used, especially by brands.

Building immersive experiences

Global sportswear giant Nike is known for thinking ahead when it comes to building consumer experiences and brand narratives. In November 2021, Nike launched Nikeland, its purpose-built metaverse space. Hosted on Roblox, Nikeland is a place where Nike fans can meet, socialize, take part in promotions and engage with a whole range of brand experiences. According to Nike, 7 million visitors have spent time in Nikeland since it launched in November 2021.

Web3 is the foundation of a parallel universe with its own ecosystem that expands the advertising and media industry in scale and innovation, believes Vishnu Mohan, partner and chief growth officer, Dept, one of the fastest-growing independent global digital agencies.

According to Mohan, with Web3, brands will have the opportunity to deepen their relationships with more immersive experiences through the creation of a new ecosystem that will give birth to re-imagination, innovation, disruption, new behavioural patterns, and transactions. Just like what Nike is doing with its Nikeland.

Mohan shares that with Web3 advertising and channel planning will be conceived differently for the real world representing “who you are and for the virtual world of who you want to be.” He further says that Web3 will re-establish digital trust and put the concerns around privacy at bay. This will move “the focus of industry to customer experience which will yield the most important outcome of loyalty.”

All about data

At the foundation of Web3 is blockchain technology and decentralisation. Varun Khiatani, who works on strategy at creative shop Talented, says, while the other elements of Web3 like NFTs and tokens still have a long way to go in terms of India’s policy-making, the blockchain itself is definitely here to stay and will change the way privacy and transparency will be perceived in the future.

Khiatan says, with the direction that personal data privacy is headed towards, it’s no surprise that users would rather own their data instead of having companies sell it to advertisers. The increased usage of ad blockers and platforms phasing out third-party cookies only bolsters that argument.

When data moves to the blockchain, “consumers will not only be able to own their data but also track its movement on-chain. This ability to track the movement of your data can very quickly fill the trust gap that exists between consumers and companies where privacy is concerned,” he explains.

This will help advertisers to verify if ads are being viewed by users or bots by tracing where the data has travelled on-chain- which aids data-driven decision-making for campaigns.

“India is uniquely positioned to take full advantage of what the blockchain has to offer. We’re already seeing blockchain-led initiatives doing rounds in the offices of public policymakers where transparency and traceability could bring a paradigm shift in the way things are run,” says Khiatani.

Tokenization and virtual shared spaces

Among the most important Web3.0 promises are tokenization and the idea of virtual shared spaces, says Rob Norman, former CEO of GroupM (North America) and advisory board member of several technology and data companies.

“The first allows for an economy of sorts through the provision of shared currency which, with agreed value, allows anyone to own and trade a digital asset. As importantly it allows for the immutable record keeping of those transactions. This is important for publishers and for brand owners in simple economic terms but also in respect of data ownership and permissions for use,” he explains.

So what does this mean for brands?

The notion of virtual shared spaces expands the range of experiences that can be created by and for professional and personal users. “Bandwidth and devices are now widely distributed, all that’s left is for people other than games publishers to invent and distribute the right experiences,” adds Norman.

In 2020, gamers around the world spent $70 billion on games without any possibility of returns. But Web 3.0 gaming could change that. Games will be designed and built by incentivising and engaging users and developers with the promise of token-based rewards. Luxury brands like Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Balenciaga, Seiko, and Tag Heuer are collaborating with popular games wherein players can buy assets such as sunglasses, clothes, bags, and sneakers, to make unique digital personalities. Experts think this will democratise fashion as a category.

“Those experiences and the appropriate tokenization will be characteristic of much future consumer experience and become the next surface in which brands need to establish presence and relevance,” concludes Norman.

Note to readers: Storyboard18’s new Month In Focus initiative spotlights themes and topics that are pushing marketers to reshape and rethink how brands interact with today’s customers. Our theme for this month is Stacks &amp; Strategies, a martech and adtech spotlight on how decision makers and marketers are advancing the adoption of new technologies and tech-driven strategies in the brand marketing ecosystem. From the defining trends and preparing for a cookiepocalypse to how progressive martech strategies help fast track business and brand growth. Catch this special on Storyboard18.

Demystifying what Web3 means for brand marketers & advertisers

WEB3