TikTok has been paving the way for growth outside of mobile screens, with partnerships inside movie theaters and airports. Now, it is formalizing the ability for brands to also monetize out-of-home on TikTok. 

At Advertising Week New York today, the social media platform announced the launch of its “Out of Phone” offering, which enables brands to bring their own TikTok videos onto a range of OOH screens or run ads alongside video content curated by TikTok for these digital OOH displays. 

TikTok’s rollout of “Out of Phone” effectively formalizes the platform’s ongoing push to extend its content beyond phone screens, led by its New Screens team created in 2021. Over the past several months, TikTok has partnered with a number of OOH media networks to bring its content to a variety of digital displays, including airport TVs, gas pump screens, billboards and Redbox movie kiosks. The platform has also inked deals to integrate its video content into pre-show programs in movie theaters and in vehicles, among other locations.

Related: Inside TikTok’s OOH marketing approach

Until now, these partnerships have largely been “pilots” for TikTok to gauge advertisers’ and consumers’ interest in bringing the platform’s content into the real world, said Dan Page, head of TikTok’s New Screens team.

TikTok and tech consultancy firm Omida identified roughly 2 billion digital OOH screens around the globe onto which it could display TikTok videos, and the social platform has spent the past two years establishing relationships with the media networks that control the content that appears on them. 

“With each partnership, we’ve been building this offering time and time again, taking learnings from each partner and evolving ‘Out of Phone’ to be what it is today,” Page said. “Obviously on-platform [content is] first and foremost, because that's where we find the highest engagement, but what we're doing is using these other screens to amplify it.”

Brands can leverage the “Out of Phone” ad offering in two ways: extending their existing TikTok campaigns and the creator-generated content that comes out of them onto OOH displays, or running their ads between collections of user-generated videos curated by TikTok. This video programming is tailored to the location of the screens it’s displayed on, Page said—for example, for its partnership with airport TV network ReachTV, TikTok created a video collection “exclusively for those screens” that revolved around “trending food, lifestyle and travel content.”

Billboards will act as the primary medium for existing TikTok campaigns and creator-generated content, functioning as “an extension of your TikTok ad that’s on-platform … and engaging creators who interact with your brand,” Page added. Other screens, such as those at gas pumps and on Redbox kiosks, will instead be “content-first” and largely offer brands a block of curated content to feature their ads in, he said. Page pointed to a recent partnership in which TikTok created a brief pre-show for an undisclosed brand at a Cineplex movie theater that wove brand placements among “some really fun TikToks.” 

“We’re working with creators; we’re clearing the content; we're making sure that our creator community is happy; and we’re showcasing some of the best of what our platform has to offer, whether it’s food, sports or education,” Page said. “We're really trying to be very diverse with the content to showcase that like the days of old—singing and dancing—isn’t what we are anymore. We’ve really evolved to be much more than that.”

Unlike in the TikTok app, the OOH video content won’t include audio and “needs to communicate its message without sound, without language,” he said. “Which is great, because then we’re able to amplify this content across the world and it’s suitable for most audiences.”

Until now, TikTok’s partnerships with OOH media networks have largely been confined to North America—but TikTok plans to extend “Out of Phone” to include more global partners moving forward, Page said. TikTok currently has a few OOH partners in Latin America and in South Korea, and is eyeing potential partners in Europe and the APAC region, he said. 

“Out of Phone” isn’t meant to completely swap social media campaigns for exclusively OOH ones, Page said. Rather, the “Out of Phone” product is intended to amplify brands’ existing TikTok campaigns and extend the reach of the user-generated content at the heart of the platform. 

“TikTok is definitely best experienced in the palm of your hand,” Page said. “But this is a product that gives you a little taste of that in places you wouldn't otherwise expect.”