TikTok Ad Spend Is Going Global. Here's What Brands Should Do About It

Australian and New Zealand brands have increased their international TikTok ad spend by 105% in just one year.

That’s not a small shift in media budget.

And it tells us something pretty interesting about where TikTok thinks it fits into brands’ growth plans.

New figures shared by TikTok show that more than one in three major Australian and New Zealand advertisers on the platform are now investing overseas, with the UK, Europe and US among the markets attracting that spend.

TikTok’s pitch is changing.

It doesn’t just want to be the place where your brand gets discovered.

It wants to help you work out where to grow next.

105% is a pretty big clue

For a long time, international expansion and social media planning could feel like two separate conversations.

You’d decide which market to enter. Do the research. Develop the proposition. Create the campaign.

Then someone would ask:

“Cool. What are we doing on TikTok?”

That order is starting to look a little backwards.

TikTok is positioning the platform as infrastructure for international growth - somewhere brands can understand new markets, develop culturally relevant creative, generate demand and turn that demand into measurable results.

And brands appear to be buying into that idea.

A 105% year-on-year increase in international ad spend suggests TikTok is increasingly being used much earlier in the growth conversation.

Because the platform isn't just giving brands somewhere to put ads.

It's giving them signals.

What are people watching?

What are they searching for?

Which products are suddenly appearing everywhere?

What are they saying in the comments?

Which creators are driving conversation?

And, importantly, where is all of that happening?

For brands looking at their next market, those signals can be pretty useful.

Hismile is a very good example

Australian oral-care brand Hismile first launched on TikTok Shop in 2023.

It now operates across 16 markets and expects to generate $50 million in TikTok Shop GMV in 2026 alone.

According to Hismile, demand generated through TikTok has also helped unlock physical retail opportunities in the US and UK.

That last bit is particularly interesting.

Because we're not just talking about a TikTok campaign generating TikTok sales.

We're talking about activity on social creating enough consumer demand to help a brand expand offline, internationally.

The line between social strategy and business strategy is getting pretty blurry.

But please don't just translate your best-performing ad

This is where it gets interesting for us.

TikTok might make reaching another country easier.

It does not make understanding another culture easier.

You can't take the TikTok that smashed it in Sydney, change a couple of words, put £20k behind it in London and assume everyone will behave in exactly the same way.

Culture doesn't work like that.

Humour changes. References change. Trends change. Creator influence changes.

Even the reason someone cares about your product can be completely different.

So when brands start using paid social to enter new markets, localisation needs to mean much more than translation.

The question isn't:

How do we make this ad work in the UK?

It's:

What would make someone in the UK care about this in the first place?

This is where creators get really useful

Creators can give brands something targeting settings can't.

Context.

They already understand the community you're trying to reach because they're part of it.

They know the language people actually use.

The jokes.

The references.

The comments people will leave.

The thing everyone is suddenly obsessed with this week.

And the kind of brand content that will immediately make someone scroll.

That's particularly valuable when you're entering a market you don't know particularly well.

Creator content can help brands become culturally relevant in that market.

Paid media can then help the best of that content travel much further.

Which brings us to something we talk about a lot at Pepper.

Stop treating paid as the bit you add at the end

You know the conversation.

“This post is doing well. Shall we stick some paid behind it?”

Paid media can do a lot more than that.

If you're thinking about entering a new market, paid gives you a pretty useful testing ground.

Test the creator.

Test the audience.

Test the hook.

Test the message.

Test the product.

Test another version.

See what people actually do.

Then put more money behind the things that work.

It sounds obvious, but it's very different from producing an entire international campaign and only finding out afterwards that nobody particularly cares.

Create. Test. Learn. Scale.

This is how we think paid social should work at Pepper.

• Create something worth watching.
• Test it with the people you actually want to reach.
• Learn from what they do.
• Scale what works.

Then do it again. That means paid media shouldn't live in its own little box.

It should be feeding into your organic strategy, creator selection, production and wider marketing decisions.

If one creator style consistently drives action, that tells us something.

If one message dramatically outperforms another, that tells us something.

If people in a market you hadn't prioritised are suddenly engaging, searching and buying?

That definitely tells us something.

Paid media isn't just there to distribute the strategy, but can help you build a better one.

And TikTok isn't the only interesting part of this

The bigger shift here is how brands think about social media.

Social platforms used to be somewhere brands went to reach an audience.

Now they can help brands understand audiences, spot emerging demand, test products, identify cultural trends, find creators, generate sales and even decide where to expand next.

TikTok says New Zealand consumer business ZURU, for example, uses community behaviour and platform data to identify emerging trends and inform product development - sometimes moving from an idea to market within three months.

That's a long way from “we need three TikToks this week”.

And it means social teams, paid teams, creators, researchers and strategists need to be talking to each other much earlier.

More budget isn't automatically better paid media

A 105% increase in international TikTok ad spend is a big number.

But the interesting part isn't that brands are spending more.

It's what they're using that spend to learn.

At Pepper, our Paid Media team works alongside our influencer, organic social, production and research teams because the best performance data shouldn't disappear into a report at the end of the month.

It should tell you what to make next, who to work with next, which audience to test next, and potentially, which market to look at next.

If TikTok wants to become part of the infrastructure brands use to grow internationally, paid social needs to become more than a media-buying exercise too.

The brands that get the most from it won't just be the ones spending more, but the ones actioning their learnings.

Want to make your paid media work harder?

Pepper combines paid media, creator marketing, organic social, production and research to help brands understand what audiences respond to, build better social-first creative and scale the things that actually work.

Find out more about our Paid Media services and how we turn social performance into smarter decisions.