At the 2025 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Wednesday, it was business as usual for TikTok as its executives presented findings from the app’s fifth annual “What’s Next Report” during a packed conference session. The panel titled TikTok: Trends to Business Transformation — Be What Happens Next on TikTok featured Cassie Taylor, the company’s global head of creative solutions and trends, and Rema Vasan, head of business marketing, who shared insights into the ways that brands broke new ground on the platform and forecasted how it will reshape marketing and business development strategies under their “Brand Chem” movement.
The looming U.S. ban on TikTok was not in the conversation’s “selective algorithm” and went unaddressed. When asked how the trend forecast would be affected by prohibition, TikTok representatives onsite at CES declined to comment on the pending legal matter, resharing their official statement from Dec. 18: “We believe the Court will find the TikTok ban unconstitutional, so the over 170 million Americans on our platform can continue to exercise their free speech rights.” However, in just a few days, the Supreme Court will hold an expedited Jan. 10 hearing to decide whether a ban on the social media app violates the First Amendment.
While they remained silent on TikTok’s future, throughout the hour-long CES presentation, company execs made their case for the platform’s advertising prowess, showcasing user data and case studies from brands that saw exponential growth due to the app’s highly engaged community.
“We are very aware that we are privileged to have a large number of audiences spending a lot of time with us not just as an entertainment destination but TikTok has a significant impact on culture … it has changed the way we shop. It has changed the way we travel. It has changed the way we search. It has even changed the way we speak. Who knows dictionary.com’s 2024 word of the year?” Vasan says, citing “demure” from TikToker and beauty influencer Jools Lebron’s catchphrase “very demure, very mindful.” “TikTok has a wide-reaching impact across audiences and culture.”
Taylor presented an abridged version of “What’s Next,” forecasting what the report calls “Trend Signals … [reflecting] evolving content patterns that highlight emerging behaviors and interests. Brands can tap into these patterns to shape a forward-looking content strategy.” She highlighted the three “Trend Signals.”
In “Brand Fusion,” brands partner with various creators to build lasting bonds with the audience, meeting them “where they are,” whether behind the scenes or on the street.
According to the Trend Report: “40 percent of users find brands that showcase personality more relevant, while 45 percent of social and video platform users feel brand relevance comes from feeling understood—emphasizing the importance of consistent, supportive and joyful content.”
Through “Identity Osmosis,” brands integrate evolving consumer values, allowing these shifting ideals to reshape their identity and connecting them to the community on a deeper level.
(Trend Report data cites: “81 percent of users say TikTok has introduced them to new topics and trends they didn’t know they liked, building a globally connected, engaged community.”)
With “Creative Catalysts,” brands explore new and efficient tools, including AI, to help them take more creative risks in content production.
(Data shows: “76 percent of TikTok users enjoy seeing a mix of images and video enabling brands to maintain relevance and continuously engage audiences. Real-time feedback in TikTok’s comment sections further enhances this strategy, allowing brands to innovate alongside consumers—with 68 percent of users saying brands should leverage comments to understand their audience better.”)
In the second part of the session, Vasan engaged Jamie Gersch, CMO of footwear giant Rothy’s and Bridget Jewell, executive creative director of ad agency Dentsu (representing Nutter Butter), who shared their TikTok success stories.
Gersch says TikTok has been essential in helping to forecast business with insights around product development.
A TikTok year-end recap of Rothy’s 2024 successes featured the launch of 42 styles, the opening of 90 stores, 100,000s of orders Mary Janes and the hosting of four bottle swaps, which signified 200 million plastic bottles kept out of landfills and turned into shoes. They attributed the multiple sellout success of their clogs and Mary Janes to their team, which “lives and breathes on the platform,” finding authentic, organic creators who are naturally in love with the brand. “The [Mary Jane] went from the number eight bestseller to the number one and wasn’t even a new product,” Gersch says, thanks to aligning with the right creators and even “deinfluencers.”
“We own our own factory. When we started to see how much momentum the Mary Jane was gaining on the platform, we went back to our product team and said, ‘There’s something here,’ and they saw the trend in the marketplace, too. Then came five new styles. We’re able to take insights that we’re seeing within the platform, within the comments section, and say, ‘How do we lean into this, and how do we develop more products that are extensions of what the customer is loving’ to fuel the momentum,” Gersch says.
Rothy’s launched a men’s version of the Clog on Black Friday by living in the comments.
“[The Mary Jane and the Clog] are two products attracting younger customers, 20 to 34-year-olds,” she says. “These products and these insights are leading to customers and more customer acquisition.”
Jewell shares that Nutter Butter was one of the Mondolez family of brands that was always “fighting for more” marketing budget. When they took it to TikTok in 2021, it had a “high brand awareness but low brand relevancy, especially with the emerging generation. It has been an interesting place for us to play, experiment and explore, and it’s created such great success.” The “crazy” visual standard with the Nutter Butter in a variety of horror-inspired pop culture scenes has accumulated more than 10 million views per video.
“From an advertising agency and a client relationship standpoint, things have changed. If you think about the history of the advertising agency and how we used to work, there was a lot of lead time and now it is much faster,” Jewell says. “What I think is the unique aspect of the way the community responded to Nutter Butter and what they’ve been doing is they feel shared ownership. We’re looking at them trying to break down the stories we’re telling on Reddit because they’re that invested in the content we’re putting out on TikTok. We’re using that to fuel what we do moving forward. Our brief comes from those comments. It doesn’t come from things we think the community might want to have. It’s what we know they want.”
To that end, in just a few short days, we will all know exactly what the Supreme Court wants regarding the presence of TikTok in all our lives.
