At this writing, it looks very much like the essential aid bill will be saddled with a potential ban on Tik Tok if the Chinese-owned company Byte Dance doesn’t sell. Well, not so fast.
Tik Tok has pledged to fight the bill in court. The ACLU has opposed the bill on First Amendment grounds, and 170 million users in the U.S. are reportedly upset because it will stymie important information, such as weird basketball shots.
This is going to be a long-fought law, and it will have many issues, not the least of them is because so many people under 30 get their news from Tik Tok, does this constitute foreign ownership of a news source? It’s going to get murky because this is unprecedented. The argument that Tik Tok is a news source may have a hard time being established, particularly in light of Fox News arguing in one case that they are “entertainment,” and the arguably questionable broad-based news value of hawking eye liner tips and the ability of anyone with a smartphone and an Internet connection to promote themselves as an expert in anything. All kidding aside, though the bill says that Byte Dance has 270 days to sell, we all know that’s not going to happen, and it’s going to be a political donnybrook.
For our purposes here at Global Toy News, however, the issue goes beyond the constitutionality or practicality of the bill. The question is: what would be the impact on the toy industry if Tik Tok did go away?
Tik Tok has become a major communication platform for toy companies, and like YouTube has taken a bite out of television advertising. User-generated videos, whether paid or organic, have become essential awareness-driving and selling tools. In a comparatively short period, they have taken on a power that was inconceivable not too long ago. While TV dominated kids’ awareness of toys and drove demand for nearly 70 years—if we consider the first toy ads hitting airwaves around 1952—social media is now one of the dominant forces. Ever since VCRs started to be in widespread use in the U.S. in the 1980s, the question for marketers has been where are kids’ consuming media? With streaming, time-shifting, and the ability of kids to be their own programmers, that answer is not as easy as it was in the 1960s and 1970s.
What social media has done is make it faster and, in some cases, less expensive to promote products (though you still have to drive kids to find things in the morass of videos out there). If Tik Tok goes away, all of that will simply move to another platform. What Tik Tok has effectively done is to establish the short-form, personal video as an effective media strategy. That’s not going away. Whether “old fogey” Facebook becomes popular with kids again, or YouTube Shorts continues to grow, the one thing we can bet on with tech-savvy kids is that they’ll find the platform and share it.
What it will require is that the toy business be ready to pivot, something we’ve all gotten used to in the past decade or so. Even if the speed with which we have to pivot sometimes seems more like spinning these days, the world isn’t going to slow down.
Kids’ desire to find out about cool stuff and share it, however, will remain a constant.
What do you think?
