When arriving at a party, there’s fashionably late and then there’s embarrassingly late. That concept also applies to TikTok.

“It’s pretty obvious when a brand jumps into something three weeks late, and it’s the sound that nobody’s using anymore,” Becca Stephenson, a TikTok creator and associate strategy director at ad agency Barbarian, told us. “Understanding how quickly culture moves on social media and being able to stay on top of it is hugely critical these days.”

In an effort to keep up with the latest audio trends and editing styles in a timely (and relevant) manner, agencies like Barbarian and Dentsu are going straight to the source, bringing TikTok creators in-house to work on brand accounts. As creators join the agency world, their roles and exact duties may vary, but the number of opportunities only seems to be growing.

Read the full story here.—KH

Spring cleaning came early for Bloomberg Media. Last fall, the publisher said it would cut ties with the programmatic open marketplace as well as the chumbox provider content recommendation company Taboola.

The pivot toward an “audience-first mentality,” as Bloomberg CEO Scott Havens called it when announcing the decision, has been underway since then.

“Going forward, if brands want to reach our audience, they’ll need to work directly with our world-class media team,” Havens wrote. As it turns out, ad tech often isn’t great for site performance, Julia Beizer, Bloomberg Media’s chief digital officer, told Marketing Brew, especially for a premium publisher.

“Site performance was something users really react to…There’s just no doubt that having a bunch of third-party libraries on your site is going to slow down performance,” Beizer said. The publisher stopped open-market programmatic advertising on January 1, and Taboola got the ax from Bloomberg’s site on March 30, Beizer said.

Continue reading here.—RB

Twitter’s ad business doesn’t seem to be recovering from Elon Musk’s acquisition last fall.

$$$: The platform’s ad revenue is expected to decline 27.9% in 2023, a drop from $4.14 billion to $2.98 billion, according to estimates from Insider Intelligence. Ad sales had previously made up 92% of Twitter’s revenue, according to its Q2 2022 earnings report.

“The biggest problem with Twitter’s ad business is that advertisers don’t trust Musk,” Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, wrote in the report. “Twitter needs to unravel Musk’s personal brand from the company’s corporate image to regain advertiser trust and bring back ad dollars.”

Despite its early efforts to woo the industry, like a Twitter Space with IAB CEO David Cohen, or partnerships with brand-safety vendors DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science, many blue-chip advertisers have continued to raise doubts about Twitter. Several said they paused advertising on the platform when Musk initially took over. However, both Nike and McDonald’s have run ads on the platform recently, with Mondelēz expected to soon return, according to Ad Age.

Coming up: Musk is set to attend a conference next week hosted by the digital marketing industry trade group MMA Global, where he’ll be interviewed by NBCU’s chairman of global advertising and partnerships, Linda Yaccarino. Already, MMA members, including McDonald’s and Colgate-Palmolive, have privately raised concerns about Musk’s appearance, per Semafor.—RB

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Explainer: TikTok’s latest trend? WaterTok. Read about why it’s taking off here.

Trendz: Meta unveiled a video series called “Performance Talks” featuring marketers discussing trends and priorities.

What’s next: Digiday explains why a competitive ad-tech ecosystem is causing supply-side platforms to innovate.

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Quote: “There’s realism there, but no soul.”—Scott Brick, an audiobook narrator, speaking to the Wall Street Journal about AI-narrated audiobooks, which sometimes feature the voices of people who’ve died

Stat: $258,000. That’s about how much former President Donald Trump spent on ads between March 19 and April 7, according to Axios, ahead of his 2024 run and in the midst of his indictment.

Read: “Is There Life After Influencing?” (The New York Times)

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• Here’s what we heard at the IAPP’s global privacy summit
• A conversation with the CMO of The North Face
• Lacoste’s logo gets the Demogorgon treatment in Netflix-themed collection