Here we go again.. Time for Sunday Rundown #34 🙂

TikTok launches TikTok For Business for marketers

The company is officially introducing a new brand and platform called “TikTok For Business” that will serve as the home for all its current and future marketing solutions for brands. At launch, the site will include access to TikTok ad formats, including its marque product, TopView, which is the ad that appears when you first launch the TikTok app. Other products under this TikTok For Business umbrella include Brand Takeovers, In-Feed Videos, Hashtag Challenges and Branded Effects.

The new AR effect, “Brand Scan,” is being added alongside the formal launch of TikTok For Business itself. Digiday had previously scooped TikTok’s AR ad plans, noting how these would present a direct challenge to Snapchat’s Sponsored Lens and Word Lenses AR formats.

Additionally, the platform is launching a new e-learning centre that will help marketers learn about TikTok and its ad offerings. This centre will include product guides, resources and creative best practices to help them launch successful campaigns. It will also help marketers learn about the Branded Effects Partner Program.

And lastly, TikTok also noted it is testing a new platform, called Creator Marketplace, in select regions. This platform, introduced last year, allows brands to discover and partner with TikTok content creators on paid brand campaigns. The concept is similar to YouTube’s BrandConnect (which recently changed its name from FameBit).

IKEA dabbles in AR experiments

IKEA and its external research lab SPACE10 have curated 18 different digital experiences from design and technology studios. They did this as part of a new web-based platform called Everyday Experiments. Each uses technologies including augmented reality, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, machine learning and spatial intelligence to help people think about the space in their homes in a different way.

Many of the SPACE10 experiments include uses of augmented reality – a technology garnering both good and bad press right now but undoubtedly a focus for the likes of Apple, Google and Magic Leap. IKEA was actually one of the first brands to roll out an AR app with Apple in 2017. The app let people plop down virtual sofas and armchairs in their own living rooms.

While these experiments are certainly diverting, you won’t be creating your own chair at your local IKEA, or figuring out how to repair your furniture from home any time soon. All of these are prototypes, and some – like Extreme Measures or Optical Sound System, an experiment that lets you visualise music or sound in the space around you – are entirely speculative.

Forget about simplicity, the new era of customization is here

Apple is slowly inching away from the very design thesis upon which Steve Jobs founded the company: that technology should be reduced to its most essential components in order to reach the largest number of users. But Apple has found, as it has scaled to nearly every corner of the earth, that one size doesn’t fit all.

And so Apple is giving users the ability to design their own interfaces. The irony is that Apple could have used this exact moment to unify its design and devices all over again. Instead, it’s handing that responsibility to every customer—and frankly, it’s a job most of us can’t possibly do as well as Apple.

Talking about design, Spotify published a two-part article in which they talk about the redesign of their platform. A very interesting piece.

Bonus links

Thanks for taking the time to read our Sunday Rundown #34. If you have a story that you want to see in this series, reply to us below or contact us.Â