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In an emotional advertisement running on Facebook and Instagram over the past month, a young woman, Katie, talks about being diagnosed with an illness that resulted in kidney failure at age 19. But she was able to find a transplant match “because a stranger was scrolling on TikTok.” Thanks to that stranger’s kidney, she continued, she was here today. “For some people, having TikTok has literally been life saving,” the company wrote in a caption punctuated by a tearful smiling emoji.
The messages are part of a new ad blitz from TikTok, the popular social media app owned by the Chinese internet giant ByteDance. The campaign frames TikTok as a savior of Americans and a champion of small businesses as the app hurtles toward an April 5 deadline to sell the company to a non-Chinese owner or face a ban in the United States.
TikTok is scrambling to right itself after the Supreme Court in January unanimously backed the law that effectively bans the app, and the platform went dark in the United States for around 12 hours. TikTok, which spent about $5 million on advertising time for commercials in February and March last year when Congress was first debating the ban, has already spent more than $7 million in the same months this year, according to estimates from AdImpact, a media tracking firm.
TikTok is trying to raise public sentiment in favor of the company, said Lindsay Gorman, the managing director of the technology program at the German Marshall Fund and a tech adviser under the Biden administration. The company is largely acting as if it is business as usual. Since February, TikTok has assured creators that it believes it has a future in the United States, largely because of the Trump administration.
Outside the ads, the company is planning to appear at industry events, including a prominent gathering for advertisers in New York, in the coming months and planning projects with American creators that extend beyond April 5. The company is listed as a partner for the Cannes Lions advertising festival in June. It is planning to present at NewFronts — an annual event hosted by the Interactive Advertising Bureau for advertisers from digital media companies in New York.
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