Nest Commerce built the technology its biggest client now runs on, and TikTok paid to help make it happen.
UK performance and creative agency Nest Commerce has been awarded a technology grant from TikTok to launch Hummingbird, an AI creative and performance platform developed specifically for the platform. The partnership was announced on TikTok's business blog, with the launch landing at TikTok's London headquarters on 23 September.
Nest Commerce works with brands including Urban Outfitters, Hims and Damson Madder, and built Hummingbird AI | Creative + Performance In One Platform to address a problem familiar to anyone running ads on TikTok: creative burns out fast, and keeping pace with shifting culture and audience behaviour is a constant grind for brand teams.
How Hummingbird works #
The platform analyses a brand's live advertising performance in real time, identifying which creative elements are resonating with audiences and feeding those insights into the next round of assets. It produces creative variations across static, motion and UGC-style formats, and monitors live campaigns for early signs of creative fatigue before performance drops off.
Nest's creative team stays central to the process. Hummingbird is built to increase the speed and scale at which teams can test, learn and create, not to remove human judgment from the loop.
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The case for the approach is already visible in Nest's own portfolio data. Across its TikTok campaigns, CPMs fell 31% year on year, spend rose 38%, and cost per acquisition dropped 10%, numbers that point to creative as one of the more direct levers brands have on TikTok performance right now.
Why TikTok backed it #
Kris Boger, General Manager, Business Solutions UK, Ireland and Benelux at TikTok, said creative is one of the biggest drivers of performance on the platform, but that the real challenge for brands is keeping pace with how quickly culture and audiences move. "The opportunity for AI isn't to replace creativity, it's to help great creative teams learn faster, experiment more and turn those insights into better work," Boger said. "That's what we saw in Hummingbird. Nest has combined technology with real creative and performance expertise, with people firmly in control of the process. It's exactly the kind of innovation we want to encourage on TikTok, which is why we backed its development and are excited to launch it with Nest at our London headquarters."
Will Ashton, CEO and co-founder of Nest Commerce, framed the grant as validation of the direction the agency has taken. "Winning this direct funding from TikTok for tech innovation is a huge endorsement of the direction we have taken," Ashton said. "TikTok gives brands an incredible opportunity to learn quickly from creative and turn those insights into growth. We built Hummingbird to help teams do that at greater speed and scale, understanding what's resonating, using those signals to shape the next round of creative, and keeping expert judgement at the heart of every decision."
The arrangement flips the usual agency-platform relationship: rather than simply buying media on TikTok, Nest is now one of the tools TikTok itself is funding to make that media work harder. For brands watching CPMs and creative fatigue closely, Hummingbird's 23 September launch gives an early look at what that funding produced. More on Nest Commerce is available at their site, nestcommerce.co.
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