LAS VEGAS — The traditional marketing planning cycle is dead. That’s the stark message for advertisers trying to succeed on discovery-driven platforms.
For brands accustomed to lengthy campaign development timelines, the platforms where consumers now spend their time operate on an entirely different clock.
“The speed at which you have to drive innovation and decision making is really going to be different in 2026,” David Kaufman, VP and head of product solutions and operations, North America, TikTok, in this video interview with Beet.TV at CES 2026.
The three returns framework
TikTok is positioning its advertising proposition around what Kaufman described as three distinct lenses:
- Return on investment.
- Return on effort.
- Return on creative.
The framework reflects the platform’s attempt to address persistent advertiser concerns about complexity and performance measurement.
The return on effort component acknowledges a common complaint about digital advertising platforms. “We don’t want it to be impossible to advertise with us,” Kaufman said. “We want to make tools that allow you to very simply capture business value.”
On the creative side, TikTok is emphasizing its creator ecosystem as a differentiator. The platform offers tools showing advertisers “what content is relevant, how it helps your business and what’s trending on the platform right now, so that you can take advantage of cultural moments at the speed that they’re happening,” Kaufman explained.
Search behavior is changing
According to eMarketer projections, TikTok is expected to generate over $17 billion in U.S. ad revenue by 2026, suggesting advertisers are increasingly buying into the platform’s approach.
One of TikTok’s more significant product bets centers on search advertising, launched last year alongside expanded Smart Plus automation capabilities. The company claims one in four users initiate a search within 30 seconds of opening the app – a statistic that suggests fundamentally different search intent than traditional query-based platforms.
“Search is being disrupted itself. It’s not just about 10 blue links,” Kaufman said. “It’s about how you can be entertained and educated and how that content will really inform what users do in the future, whether they’re discovering your brand or they’re in the final stages of research before they make a purchase decision.”
The platform has expanded beyond keyword-based search advertising to include what it calls “search hub,” which allows advertisers to take over a category and curate results for specific audiences.
Collapsing the funnel
TikTok is betting heavily on solutions that span the entire customer journey. The platform’s GMV Max solution, tied to TikTok Shop, enables purchases at the point of discovery without users leaving the app.
“This has been the great dream in digital marketing for a long time. How do you unify your efforts across the entire marketing funnel?” Kaufman said. “We’ve unified these solutions. So if you look at something like Smart Plus, what it can do is take people all the way from the point of discovery to transaction on your own site.”
The commerce ambitions are substantial. eMarketer forecasts TikTok Shop’s U.S. e-commerce sales will reach $23.41 billion in 2026, potentially surpassing established retailers including Target and Best Buy.
Whether those projections materialize depends partly on whether advertisers can adapt to the platform’s velocity-first approach to marketing.
You’re watching Beet.TV coverage from CES 2026. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
