“TikTok is here — we are here,” Khartoon Weiss, the company’s vice president of global business solutions, told a packed warehouse of advertisers on Tuesday in Manhattan.
“We are absolutely confident in our platform and confident in the future of this platform,” she declared.
That statement was the closest TikTok advertising executives got to addressing the app’s uncertain fate in the United States in the company’s annual spring pitch to marketers. Under a federal law and executive order, the app is set to be banned in the country next month if the Chinese owner of the company, ByteDance, does not sell it.
Hundreds of representatives from companies like L’Oreal and Unilever and various ad agencies scrambled to find seats for an event hosted by the comedian Hasan Minhaj that heavily emphasized TikTok’s role as a cultural juggernaut.
TikTok was more than a video platform, Mr. Minhaj told the crowd. TikTok was “the cultural moments you talk about at work, the jokes you talk about in your group chat, the language you use in your everyday life,” he said.
The tone of the event marked a departure from TikTok’s presentation a year ago, when the company was smarting from the federal law that promised to ban the app in the United States because of national security concerns related to the company’s Chinese ownership. Last year’s pitch started with one of TikTok’s top executives telling roughly 300 attendees that the company would fight the law in court and prevail and was “not backing down.”
TikTok did not actually win in court — the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law in January — but the company has earned an unusual reprieve from President Trump. He has essentially put a pause on the law, which was set to go into effect in January, most recently giving the company until June to find new owners. On Sunday, he suggested he would extend the reprieve again if ByteDance needed more time.
The presentation on Tuesday was a reminder that beyond the battles in Washington, TikTok faces the same pressures as any other major social media company — winning ad dollars and promising major brands safe spaces for their messages to run. TikTok has a foothold among marketers hawking everything from clothing to beauty hacks despite competition from Meta’s Instagram Reels and Google’s YouTube. TikTok says it has 170 million users in the United States.
At the event, the company promoted new tools that would let marketers run their messages alongside viral trends, and it pitched advertisers on the additional exposure they could get from running ads on TikTok during the Super Bowl. Ms. Weiss also told marketers that the company was eager to develop ways for advertisers to capitalize on search queries, as people increasingly use TikTok as an alternative to popular search engines like Google.
Krishna Subramanian, chief executive and co-founder of the influencer marketing firm Captiv8, attended the advertiser presentation and said that the audience had benefited from the reassurance about TikTok’s future.
“Hearing that TikTok is here to stay from TikTok leadership becomes really powerful, as we think about our strategies for 2025,” he said. “Seeing their investments within generative A.I., within product, within cultural moments — it’s where brands need to be.”
The event also highlighted some of the turnover that has taken place at TikTok in its past year of turmoil. Blake Chandlee, TikTok’s former president of global business solutions, who kicked off the event in 2024, recently resigned from his role, following the departures of other prominent executives in ad sales.
Mr. Minhaj’s appearance at TikTok’s presentation marks the start of a star-studded season of pitches from television networks and other tech companies to advertisers. YouTube’s annual advertiser pitch this month will feature a performance from Lady Gaga.
“Ten years ago, I was just a struggling comedian performing at dive bars, doing the occasional keynote for Vine,” Mr. Minhaj said. “I would have loved to have TikTok when I was starting out as a comic — we have seen comedians build entire careers off of it.”
