If the proposed stateside ban of TikTok is enacted, the U.S. will have to bid adieu to the app’s seemingly never-ending roster of viral dances and meme trends, its knack for extremely niche community-building and, for corporate users, a particularly captive audience for company messaging.
While that final loss may pose a challenge to the pharmaceutical companies that currently use TikTok for marketing purposes, it certainly won’t mark the end of the world for their social media efforts. In fact, according to Charlotte Turner, vice president of social strategy at Ogilvy Health, the possibility of a ban on the platform should serve as an “opportunity” and a much-needed reminder to practice flexibility when it comes to social media outreach.
“This is a mindset that they should be applying to any channel at the moment—in terms of, not just TikTok being this uncertain space, but having an agile view of the social media landscape is important in general,” Turner said in an interview with Fierce Pharma Marketing.
“We’ve seen several outages across other social media lately—with Facebook and Instagram going down, and LinkedIn went down—and being able to move with agility is a core component of how any of our clients operate on any of these channels anyway,” she said. “That’s never going to change. That’s part of the digital landscape and how we operate now.”
To that end, Ogilvy doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all suggestion for where its pharma clients should shift the energy they previously directed toward TikTok content if the ban goes through.
“It really is about being able to move with agility,” Turner said. “Our blanket statement is to stay attuned to the platform updates, but we also do provide counsel on an individual basis, and that’s the way we have to operate—really thinking about having an audience-driven mindset. We wouldn’t be able to give a remit to everyone to just suddenly shift all their attention to Instagram, if that doesn’t fit the brief for a particular client.”
And while there are plenty of other platforms where any vertical video content originally designed for dissemination on TikTok could be transferred, such as Instagram and Facebook Reels and YouTube Shorts, Turner advised against “shifting for the sake of shifting,” pointing out how the apps that have popped up to recreate the feel of Twitter before the Elon Musk takeover, for example, haven’t yet been very successful in capturing that same audience.
“I think the cool thing is thinking about where those audiences are moving and going with the communities you want to reach,” she said, again emphasizing the importance of a primarily “audience-driven” social media strategy. “A ban on TikTok could have implications on how and where people are spending their time in general and how they’re consuming content, rather than it just being a like-for-like swap.”
The fate of the U.S. government’s proposed TikTok ban is still unclear. Earlier this month, the bill passed through the House of Representatives by a large majority; next up, the Senate plans to conduct a rigorous review of the bill before putting it to a vote in that chamber.
If passed, the bill will ban TikTok in the U.S. if its owner, Beijing-based ByteDance, doesn’t sell off the U.S. assets of the social media platform. As the Associated Press reports, the bill stems from lawmakers’ fears that the Chinese government could use the app to gain unauthorized access to U.S. citizens’ data or to circulate propaganda and misinformation; to date, there’s no evidence that this has occurred, and ByteDance has previously said that it would not comply if the Chinese government requested access to private user data.
With that debate still ongoing, Turner noted that none of Ogilvy’s pharma clients have flagged any “core concerns” about TikTok’s data privacy practices.
“Our clients take data very seriously—but that is true across any platform they use, not just TikTok,” she said. “Ultimately, we’re heading into a new era of digital regulation, which I think is a good thing. And pharma’s no stranger to regulation, so they’ll be happy to move and progress with the guidance that comes out.”
Fierce Pharma Marketing sent requests to five drugmakers currently active on TikTok, asking for comment on how a ban would affect their social media strategy and on any potential data security issues linked to the platform; all either declined to comment or didn’t respond to the request.
There’s also the fact that TikTok isn’t exactly top of mind for most pharmas. There aren’t many drugmakers posting regularly on the app, and Ogilvy’s 2023 report on how pharmas can most effectively use social media even left TikTok out of its analysis, focusing instead on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn and the platform then known as Twitter, now X.
Turner noted that TikTok is “still largely seen as an experimental place—which is great, because things change so quickly; social media should be seen as a great place to experiment with new ways of reaching our audiences.”
The few companies that do choose to operate on TikTok in the “traditional” sense, with a corporate branded account, typically fill that page with “high-level disease awareness campaign videos,” she said, although some do choose to launch advertising campaigns on the platform, too.
But there are other, less visible ways that pharmas may choose to use the platform, including by tapping well-known influencers to create “#sponsored” content for the brand on their own accounts, to “great success,” according to Turner.
“I think pharma’s learned the lesson that it doesn’t need to come from them for it to be effective, if the ultimate goal is to help raise awareness to drive people to use more resources,” she said.
Another of those behind-the-scenes uses for TikTok may see pharmas employing it as a research-gathering tool, rather than an active marketing platform—as “a place for inspiration and general social listening,” Turner said.
“Even if you’re not speaking on the platform itself, there are great opportunities to learn what is important to your audience and to your community and to listen, not just speak,” she continued. “TikTok is a touchstone for culture. It’s the birthplace of so many trends that go out beyond the platform itself. So, even if they’re not active there, they can still learn a lot from TikTok.”