In a television ad, Sister Monica Clare, a nun in northern New Jersey, walks through a church bathed in sunlight and sits in a pew, crossing herself. Her message: TikTok is a force for good.
“Because of TikTok, I’ve created a community where people can feel safe asking questions about spirituality,” she says in the ad.
Sister Monica Clare is one of several TikTok fans — along with ranchers, a Navy veteran known as Patriotic Kenny and business people — whom the company is targeting in ads as it faces intense scrutiny in Washington.
“TikTok definitely has a branding problem in the United States,” sister Monica Clare, 58, said in an interview. “Most people you talk to, especially people over 60, will say that TikTok is just a bunch of superficial rubbish. They don’t use it. They don’t understand what the content is.
“It’s very smart for TikTok to say no, we’re not that – we’re much more than that,” he added.
That appears to be the idea driving TikTok’s multimillion-dollar marketing on television and on rival social platforms nationwide — tagged #KeepTikTok — as the Senate considers a bill that would force the company’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell implementation or face a national ban. Many lawmakers from both parties said the app could compromise the personal data of American users or be used as a tool for Chinese propaganda.
Since the House voted in favor of the bill three weeks ago, the company has spent at least $3.1 million in advertising time on ads scheduled to run through April, according to data from AdImpact, a media tracking firm. Some of the places he is targeting the most are the presidential battleground states of Pennsylvania, Nevada and Ohio, according to the data. TikTok has also spent more than $100,000 on Facebook and Instagram ads recently, according to ad library Meta.
TikTok said it was spending more than AdImpact data indicated, but the company did not provide details. When asked about its advertising efforts, Michael Hughes, a spokesman for TikTok, said: “We believe the general public needs to know that the government is trying to trample on the free speech rights of 170 million Americans and destroy seven million small businesses in the whole country”.
The ads are part of a broad lobbying campaign by TikTok to reshape the perception of the company among lawmakers and the public. He strongly opposed the bill, which he characterized as an outright ban, saying it does not and will not share data with Beijing or allow any government to influence its algorithmic recommendations for videos that users can watch.
ByteDance spent $8.7 million on lobbying last year, according to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit research group, and its internal team and a variety of outside firms are trying to influence lawmakers. It has mobilized its massive user base to contact their representatives, although some of these efforts may have failed. And Shou Chew, TikTok’s CEO, is co-chairing this spring’s Met Gala, where TikTok will be the main sponsor.
TikTok began amplifying the stories of everyday Americans like Sister Monica Clare and Patriotic Kenny last year through a campaign it calls TikTok Sparks Good. Much of this effort appeared to appeal to a conservative audience. It spent an estimated $19 million on TV ads that ran heavily on news programs, especially Fox News, according to data from iSpot.tv, a TV metrics firm. TikTok aired more than a dozen ads during the Republican presidential debates or debate-related programming last year, the company said. It’s still running ads promoting creators from last year’s campaign.
“It’s such a classic tactic,” said Cait Lamberton, a marketing professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “They take an idea, put it in a person’s mouth and allow you to make a connection with that person.”
He added, “TikTok is shaping up to be a brand that stands for the freedom and democratization of communication and frankly a lot of values ​​that most people are pretty comfortable with.”
One of TikTok’s newest TV commercials was filmed last month, when the company flew dozens of video creators to Washington to protest the House bill. The ad is narrated by the creators and shows a couple of signs being held on the steps of the Capitol, which say: “TikTok has changed my life for the better.”
Trevor Boffone, a University of Houston lecturer with more than 300,000 followers on TikTok, is also in the ad, describing how the app has made him a better teacher and connects with an audience far beyond his classroom.
He said he had been to events full of TikTok creators who were into “fun, dancing,” but that the group in Washington was “a radically different group of people.”
TikTok brought together “ordinary Americans with amazing stories about how the platform has helped them with their mental health, their disabilities and various crises in their communities like wildfires and even open-heart surgeries,” he said. “All these really important ways that this platform has built community in ways that lawmakers don’t know about.”
Mr Boffone, 38, said the group’s links to TikTok had urged creators to talk to their senators about the bill. (Sister Monica Clair said she had written a letter opposing the bill to Senator Cory Booker, D-New Jersey. Mr. Boffone said he had not yet been able to contact his representative.)
Creators worried that even a sale of TikTok by ByteDance could “change the culture of the app,” he said.
“We’ve seen what happened to Twitter and how Twitter is a shell of what it once was,” Mr. Boffone said. “Congress should consider comprehensive data security and legislation on social media and digital platforms that Meta is looking at, that Google is looking at.”
Americans are likely to see more ads for TikTok as outside groups also benefit from the bill.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which has seen the legislation as a threat to First Amendment rights, last month ran ads on Facebook and Instagram linking to an opposition letter that people should send to their senators. A spokeswoman for the organization said it had no formal partnership or fundraising relationship with TikTok or ByteDance.
Supporters of the bill are also running ads. Newly formed nonprofit groups led by conservatives, whose advocates are unclear, are airing television ads and posting ads on social media.
One of those groups, the Coalition of American Parents, is led by Ali Mare, a PR firm founder and Health and Human Services spokesman in the Trump administration. It promised “a seven-figure awareness campaign” called “TikTok Is Poison” in a March 20 press release.
Another group, State Armor Action, is led by Michael Lucci, a former policy adviser to a Republican governor in Illinois and a former Trump appointee to a Federal Labor Relations Authority panel. The group announced a multi-million dollar ad campaign targeting TikTok on March 20 as well.
Ms. Marré said her group’s TikTok effort was its first campaign, but declined to share information about its financial backers. Mr. Lucci also declined to identify his group’s donors, but said he believed TikTok “should be assigned to American ownership.”
The intensity of the battle has taken its toll on Sister Monica Claire. She was happy when her ad started running, she said, but was soon surprised to receive hate mail and even a few angry phone calls.
“It was this rush of, ‘Oh, so exciting,’ and then, ‘Oh, how terrible,'” he said. “It was really from people who were committed to the idea that China is spying on us through TikTok, from people who have probably never used social media in their lives.”
He said he hoped TikTok’s marketing efforts, including advertising, would help send a different message about the app. (The company donated $500 to its convent in Mendham, NJ, for its participation, he said.)
“There’s a huge community of people doing good on TikTok,” he said.
