TikTok Smart+ Gives Advertisers More Control Over Automation. And That's a Good Thing

TikTok is giving advertisers more control over how much control they give TikTok.

Yes, we know that sounds slightly backwards, but it’s an important change.

TikTok has upgraded Smart+, its AI-powered advertising solution, so advertisers can now choose between full automation, partial automation or fully manual campaign management.

Rather than handing the whole campaign over to the machine, advertisers can decide where TikTok takes the wheel and where they’d rather keep their hands on it.

That includes decisions around audiences, budgets, placements, catalogues and creative.

And we think that's much more interesting than another platform telling advertisers to press a button and let AI sort everything out.

Automation is great. Until you don't want it.

The promise of automated media buying is pretty compelling.

Give the platform your objective, budget and creative.

Let its algorithms find the right people. Watch the conversions roll in. Go and make a cup of tea.

Except paid media isn't always that straightforward. Sometimes you have a very specific audience you need to reach, there are placements you don't want, you're deliberately testing one creative variable against another, you need tighter control over budget, and sometimes the point of a campaign isn't just to generate the cheapest possible conversion.

You actually want to learn something.

Instead of forcing advertisers to choose between automation and control, the upgraded experience lets them decide which bits they want to automate.

TikTok has brought its manual and Smart+ experiences into one campaign creation flow, with advertisers able to adjust automation across targeting, placement, budget, creative and catalogue settings.

So the question changes from: “Should we automate this campaign?”

To: “What should we automate in this campaign?”

Much better question.

Not every campaign needs the same answer

This is where paid media expertise becomes more important, not less.

If you're running a mature conversion campaign with plenty of performance data, giving the algorithm more freedom could make a lot of sense.

TikTok says full Smart+ setups have delivered 41% lower CPA compared with fully manual setups in its commerce campaign data.

But even TikTok's own guidance makes clear that automation needs the right conditions to work effectively, including enough budget and conversion volume for campaigns to learn.

So no, we're not about to recommend switching everything to full automation and going home.

Different objectives need different approaches.

If we're trying to scale proven creative, we'd probably be pretty interested in what greater automation can do.

If we're trying to understand whether Audience A responds better than Audience B, we might want tighter control.

If there are brand safety requirements, we're keeping an eye on placement.

If we're testing a new creative proposition, product or market, we need to make sure automation doesn't muddy the thing we're actually trying to learn.

Automation should solve a problem.

Not become the strategy.

TikTok is also blurring the line between paid and organic

There's another Smart+ development we think social teams should be paying attention to.

TikTok's Paid and Organic campaign optimisation allows advertisers to connect eligible organic content with their Smart+ campaigns.

Smart+ can add clickable anchor links to selected organic Spark Ads, giving people who discover the video organically a direct route to convert.

More importantly, TikTok can then optimise towards conversions across both paid and organic traffic, with unified reporting covering impressions, clicks and conversions.

That might sound like a fairly technical advertising update.

Strategically, it's much more interesting.

Because paid and organic social have spent far too long sitting in separate boxes.

Your best organic post might also be your best ad

Social teams already know that organic content is one of the best places to learn what audiences care about.

You post something. People watch it.

Or they don't.

They share it. Save it. Comment on it. Search for the product.

Tell you it's brilliant. Tell you it's terrible. Tell you the completely unexpected reason they actually want it.

That's useful information.

So instead of the organic team learning one set of things while the paid team builds an entirely separate campaign, why wouldn't you connect the two?

Organic finds the signal. Paid tests it.

Performance tells you whether the signal was real. Then you scale it.

That's a much healthier relationship between paid and organic than: “This Reel did quite well. Shall we boost it?”

Create. Test. Learn. Scale.

We talked about this in our recent look at TikTok's push to become a global growth platform, and Smart+ reinforces it.

Paid social works best when it becomes a learning loop.

Create: Build social-first creative around an actual audience insight.

Test: Use paid to understand which audiences, creators, messages and formats drive action.

Learn: Look beyond views and work out what actually influenced behaviour.

Scale: Give the strongest combinations more budget and let automation help you find additional opportunities.

Then take everything you've learned and feed it back into the next piece of organic content, creator brief or campaign, and start again.

AI doesn't mean switching your brain off

This is probably our biggest takeaway from the Smart+ update.

The platforms are going to automate more of media buying. That's happening whether we like it or not.

TikTok can already automate decisions around audiences, products, placements and creative combinations at a scale no human media buyer could realistically replicate manually.

That's useful, but it doesn't remove the need for paid media expertise. It changes where that expertise matters.

Instead of spending all day making tiny manual adjustments, paid teams can spend more time deciding what the platform should optimise towards, what data it should learn from, where humans need to retain control and, most importantly, what the results are actually telling us.

The machine can optimise the campaign, but it can't decide whether the campaign is asking the right question in the first place.

Better automation needs better inputs

There's another slightly less exciting truth about all of this. Smart+ can only work with what you give it.

Weak creative doesn't become brilliant because AI optimised the placement.

A confused proposition doesn't suddenly make sense because you've automated the audience.

And if you're feeding the system limited conversion data, there is only so much it can learn.

That's why we think the most interesting bit of this update isn't actually the automation. It's the flexibility.

TikTok is acknowledging that advertisers need different levels of control depending on what they're trying to achieve, and that’s how we think paid media should work.

Our approach at Pepper

At Pepper, paid isn't something we bolt onto social once the creative is finished.

Our Paid Media team works alongside organic social, influencer marketing, production and research so every part of the campaign can inform the next.

Organic tells us what audiences are responding to, creators give us new creative and audience signals. Paid lets us test and scale them, and performance tells us what to do next.

And automation? We'll use as much of it as helps us get there.

We’ve learnt that the strongest paid media strategy isn't fully automated or fully manual, but knowing when to use each.

Want to make your paid social work harder?

Pepper combines paid media, organic social, creator marketing, production and research to build campaigns that don't just generate results - they generate useful information about what your audience wants next.

Find out more about our Paid Media services and how we use creative, data and smart automation to make every pound work harder.