While the U.S. government debates TikTok's future following last week's congressional hearing, the video entertainment platform today announced a new product called Branded Effects aimed at businesses marketing themselves on its platform. The solution will allow brands to collaborate with TikTok effect creators to design custom effects — like AR experiences and other interactive features — to accompany their online campaigns and marketing efforts.

The solution, Effect House Branded Effects, is an extension of TikTok's existing development platform, Effect House, launched about a year ago. The company had put the tools necessary to develop AR effects in creators' hands, letting them extend TikTok's existing AR effect library — a competitive feature for its app.

This includes all other things AR effect creators would need to get started, such as templates, tutorials, and documentation explaining how to create certain effects, like Segmentation, Face Mask, Head Tracker, Face Stretch and 3D Face, or use different textures, materials, lighting and shadows, etc.

TikTok unveils its own AR development platform, Effect House.

Now, brands can work with TikTok's top effect creators to build out effects for the brand's social media and online campaigns that include features such as a call-to-action or custom audience targeting, among others.

Branded Effects can be used by brands to engage users in many ways, such as giving them ways to virtually try on makeup, change the user's hair color, have them put on a hat, overlay a sticker or frame onto the video, follow dance moves, use head movements to steer a vehicle, unlock animations by scanning images, text, or objects in real life, and more.

It further suggests that the product makes sense for a host of businesses. As an example, brands operating in spaces such as personal care, beauty, consumer packaged goods, entertainment, and retail may find this product relevant to their needs.

The Branded Effects allows a brand to bring more and more views to a specific piece of content with paid branding traffic solutions while positioning an effect directly into premium placements in the "Trending" tab on the panel in order to reach even bigger audiences. All formats, TikTok added, it has support in showing off those branded effects and are great in forwarding viewers directly from there onto the Effects Page on the app where a tap and selecting the branded effect.

Brands can also curate the brand-safe videos shown on the effect's detail page to ensure that only acceptable or positive videos are visible when someone on TikTok looks it up in the app so they can see how others are using it.

We have seen how brands use effects on TikTok in very creative ways to reach new audiences, share stories, and build community," said Greg Feingold, Effect House Community Lead, in a statement. "By working with the top Effect House creators to create effects, brands can further harness the creativity and authenticity of the TikTok community.".

TikTok commented that some of the businesses already taking advantage of the effects reach TikTok's online community include Microsoft. In the blog, TikTok said that Superdigital - an agency with Microsoft 365, created effect WordArt You in joint collaboration with the Effect House creators @eddyin3D and @janmahavan. This helped create 126,000 videos on TikTok, and many views.

The second one is Mucinex, an early adopter, who launched a Branded Effect campaign that received a 42.7% increase in purchase intent, according to an online case study. Dirol, the brand for gum, and Netflix Germany, as well as Shoppers Drug Mart, were the other testers of Branded Effect.

This is interesting in terms of timing, because the threat of a possible ban on TikTok in the U.S. has already sent advertisers scrambling to develop contingency plans as to where to shift their marketing efforts if TikTok is no longer accessible. Brands and agencies are holding meetings, but some who are enjoying strong performance from their ads on TikTok have no plan to get out, Reuters reported recently. The report also used data from Insider Intelligence, which said that TikTok's ad revenue in the United States is expected to reach $6.83 billion this year, from $780 million in 2020.

The hearing happened just days before TikTok announced its platform now has 150 million monthly active users in the United States.