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. President Trump, who paused a federal law demanding TikTok’s sale because of national security concerns related to its ties to China, has said he will give the app more time for a deal if needed.
But TikTok does not appear to be taking any chances.
In the past couple of months, the company has wallpapered Washington in marketing, bought wraparound ads in the print editions of The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and poured money into national commercials. (Continuing the theme of saving lives, TikTok’s ads have also featured a creator who sells a product that helps with administering CPR.)
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. “This movement to ‘save TikTok’ has not gone away in the 11th hour of these negotiations.”
TikTok declined to comment.
Outside the ads, 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, several creators said.
“It’s a total 180,” said H. Lee Justine, a TikTok creator and author. “Back in January, if you were on the app, you were hearing about the ban every single day. It’s not even on my For You Page now — no one’s chattering about it.”
Ms. Justine was among creators who joined a briefing call in February with TikTok executives, including Michael Beckerman, TikTok’s head of public policy for the Americas, the tone of which buoyed her spirits.
“They were really, really hopeful,” Ms. Justine said.
Ad spending on the platform appears to have recovered this month. Many major brands had paused their marketing on the platform before the ban in January and did not fully return in February, according to data from MikMak, a software company that tracks which ads lead to retail sales for more than 2,000 brands. The law required app store like Apple’s and Google’s to remove TikTok, and those companies did not reinstate it until mid-February. So far in March, MikMak has seen advertising traffic from TikTok return to the same level as in the fourth quarter.
“There’s really no channel out there that does everything that TikTok does, and until brands are told otherwise that they can no longer spend dollars there, they will,” said Rachel Tipograph, chief executive of MikMak.
The company is also 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.
TikTok is listed as a partner for the Cannes Lions advertising festival in the south of France in June. The company flew Shou Chew, its chief executive, and U.S.-based TikTok stars like Alix Earle to the confab last year. In May, 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; the presentation is sandwiched between the streaming service Tubi’s and the technology company Yahoo’s.
“It has been back to business as usual on TikTok’s end,” said Daniel Daks, chief executive of Palette Media, an agency that represents more than 230 social media stars. “They continue to plan through projects that reach well beyond the theoretical ban date.”
TikTok and ByteDance have maintained for years that a sale of the app is impossible, in part because it would be blocked by the Chinese government. Despite the looming deadline for a deal and chatter from Mr. Trump about potential suitors, TikTok has not said whether that position has changed.
Last week, top aides on Capitol Hill met with Oracle, the tech company whose name keeps coming up as a potential suitor of TikTok. Lawmakers who championed the law that bans TikTok if it is not sold have recently expressed concern that TikTok and ByteDance might try to strike a deal with the Trump administration that would maintain Chinese influence over the app and its algorithm.
In some ways, TikTok’s advertising blitz is one more attempt from the company to assuage those concerns from lawmakers, Ms. Gorman said.
“TikTok is essentially trying to re-litigate the law and encouraging Congress to backtrack on calls to enforce it.”
Desiree Hill, a 39-year-old mechanic in Georgia who has appeared in TikTok’s ads, said she believed the highlighting of small business owners was meant to reach policymakers. “It’s a huge economy booster — you take that away and businesses suffer,” she added.
But she’s also more concerned about TikTok’s future than she was at the beginning of January.
“They showed us they can cut access, so I feel like it’s more of a threat right now,” she said.
