Produced | Tiger Sniff Commercial, Consumer and Mobile Group
The author | Huang Qingchun
The title image | Visual China
On Friday (January 21), a news that "TikTok's global marketing director Nick Tran was fired for planning fake marketing" went viral.
First, the US technology media The Information reported that two people familiar with the matter revealed that TikTok's global marketing director Nick Tran had left; subsequently, the New York Post reported that TikTok's former marketing director Nick Tran was fired for planning false marketing such as "TikTok's entry into catering".
Nick Tran image source LinkedIn
Last night (January 24), Tiger Sniff learned from an exclusive report by Pandaily, an English-language media outlet focused on China's tech industry, that Nick Tran was fired or related to the "TikTok Kitchen" series of marketing campaigns he launched at the end of December 2021 – Zhang Yiming even stated internally that "these activities have become both negative, joke news that hurts brands and seriously damages the business." ”
Pandaily confirmed to Tiger Sniff that earlier this month (January 2022), Zhang Yiming had discussed with ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo and TikTok current CEO Zhou Shouzi on Feishu, saying, "I recently saw it in the media and was asked by a friend what was going on. I was depressed, didn't want to answer, didn't know how to answer, it wasn't the first time the second time the third time. I'm sure the management team has also summed up the stress that this can't be the case, and I don't know why we've been making superficial gimmick marketing again and again. ”
"These campaigns become both negative, joke news that hurts brands and wreaks havoc on the business. This type of marketing is usually done by narcissistic dinosaur companies that 'pretend' to be innovative, and we're about to become that way. I think this is completely contrary to the principle of 'user-centric, business-centric, sincere and natural to the public'. ”
Shortly thereafter, the news of Nick Tran's expulsion was broken by the media. In this regard, a TikTok spokesperson recently publicly stated, "Nick Tran is no longer employed at TikTok and sincerely wishes him all the best in the future." ”
It can be seen that even though Zhang Yiming has withdrawn from the board of directors of ByteDance in 2021 and handed over the CEO position of ByteDance to Liang Rubo, his will still plays a vital role in the development process of ByteDance.
Zhang Yiming (left) and Liang Rubo (right)
In fact, in the past few years, Zhang Yiming led ByteDance to crash into the hunting forbidden lands of BAT (Douyin) and Google/Meta/Amazon (TikTok), and after encountering heavy fire, he still inadvertently rewrote the global pattern of short videos, giving birth to a national entertainment platform. However, today, byteDance has more than 110,000 employees worldwide and its business covers more than 150 countries and regions, and the company's organizational ability and corporate culture construction have undoubtedly become the biggest problems to be faced next.
Zhang Yiming publicly expressed his views on the management of large companies as early as 2016, "As the company grows, the business becomes more and more complex, and the talent team will inevitably be diluted while expanding the scale of personnel." ”
LinkedIn China, Nick Tran previously served as Vice President of Brand Marketing and Culture at Hulu and held positions at companies such as Samsung, Taco Bell and Stability Socks, a clothing startup.
According to people familiar with the matter, Nick Tran joined TikTok from Hulu in April 2020 and has led a series of topical marketing plans in less than two years of his tenure, including TikTok's entry into catering, TikTok's transition to takeaway, TikTok layout NFT (non-homogeneous tokens) and so on. In addition, Nick Tran has also led the launch of a project to support the sending of "video resumes" job search, encouraging users to find jobs through short video resumes, and using TikTok as a recruitment channel.
As for the aforementioned "TikTok Kitchen" marketing campaign, it only took less than a month to push back to December 2021, when foreign media reported that TikTok would open more than 1,000 virtual restaurants by the end of 2022 and make food based on the most popular recipes on TikTok. Nick Tran even planned to partner with Virtual Dining Concepts to launch a takeaway-only "TikTok Kitchen" nationwide.
In this regard, the head of TikTok made it clear at the press conference that "TikTok Kitchen" is more of a marketing effort to bring the popular food of the platform to fans, rather than the company's formal entry into the catering industry.
As of press time, several of the marketing projects led by Nick Tran within TikTok have been suspended, and Vanessa Pappas, TikTok's global chief operating officer, will temporarily take over global marketing responsibilities.
In fact, TikTok has become a company with obvious exports of overseas products to the world. Its expansion map has local offices throughout the country, and it not only recruits executives from Disney, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Sony, but also employs a large number of local employees and international students. In this regard, Zhang Yiming said in an interview with Qian Yingyi, dean of Tsinghua School of Economics and Management, "Our strategy is to globalize products and localize content. ”
As of June 2021, Kevin Mayer has left his job in August
It is equivalent to saying that remote collaboration, office system, management system, and even many underlying basic capabilities are being built synchronously, coupled with the acquisition of local teams and local operations, which makes TikTok produce a huge synergy under the blessing of algorithms, organization and operation.
Thanks to this, according to App Annie's survey data, in 2020, TikTok is already the app with the longest average user time in the United States, and Meta's Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger can only rank 2 to 5.
It can be seen that TikTok's growth rate is significantly faster than facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and other star products, and it has grown into a behemoth under the eyes of Meta.
Moreover, TikTok has full staying power in the global short video social map - according to Sensor Tower data, TikTok's total downloads on the global App Store and Google Play exceeded 3 billion times in July 2021 (this is the first non-Meta app to achieve this data); according to the US technology company Cloudflare on December 20, 2021, TikTok Has surpassed Google to become the most visited Internet site in the world.