TikTok has been making a splash with some announcements at Advertising Week New York 2026, and while they’re not directly music-related, they’re worth taking in if you’re doing marketing on the platform.
One launch is the TikTok Ad Network, which is initially for advertisers based in the US, and lives within the existing TikTok Ads Manager tool.
It’s a network for brands to “extend their campaigns beyond TikTok and reach audiences across a premium network of nearly 400,000 apps worldwide”.
TikTok is also getting into the world of MCP (Model Context Protocol) with its own tool enabling “developers to build AI agents and tools directly on top of TikTok Ads ecosystem to plan, launch, and manage advertising workflows with fewer manual steps”.
Announced earlier this year, the TikTok for Business MCP has seen a 200%-plus increase in the number of advertisers using it, the company said this week.
AI is also driving another new TikTok thing this week: ‘Agentic commerce’. That includes a conversational agent called ‘Shopping Assistant’ that “guides users through their shopping journey” within the app, and a ‘Buy Direct’ tool to enable them to “make purchases directly from the For You feed with just one click”.