In the mid-19th century, the publishing world underwent a seismic shift. We moved from the chaotic, unregulated era of penny dreadfuls, where anonymous authors sold scandalous stories on street corners for cash, to the standardised, industrialised era of the serial novel. Authors like Dickens and publishers like Chapman & Hall built systems. They standardised distribution. They professionalised the author-editor relationship. They turned storytelling into an industry.
For the last five years, TikTok has been our Victorian Wild West. It was the era of the viral lottery, the unknown influencer, and the chaotic dashboard. It was magical, yes, but it was messy.
That era ended this morning.
tiWith the release of the TikTok Q1 2026 Product Preview, the platform has signaled its transition from a growth experiment to a commercial engine. This is the infrastructure of maturity.
As I analyzed the four major updates, ranging from Registered Business Accounts to the new Smart+ Creative Automation, I realised we are witnessing the Industrial Revolution of Attention. TikTok is no longer just asking for your content; it is asking for your business logic.
Below, I’ve deconstructed these updates not just as new tools, but as strategic imperatives for 2026.
We’ll look at how brands like Toyota, Universal Pictures, and Clinique are already using this infrastructure, and how you can leverage tools like Influencity to stay ahead of the machine.
The Update: Registered Business Accounts & Clearer Agency Credit.
For years, the line between an influencer and a business on TikTok was blurry. A brand account looked suspiciously like a user account, just with a logo.
With Set #1, TikTok is drawing a hard line in the sand. The introduction of Registered Business Accounts connects your profile to a verified legal entity. This unlocks the organic features we’ve been begging for: Link in Bio, Lead Gen, and Multi-User Access.
But more importantly, it introduces Safeguards, age-gating and geo-fencing.
In my recent Voices of the Industry interview with talent mogul Alex Segal, we discussed the "cutthroat" nature of the industry and the need for credit. TikTok has finally listened. The new Agency Attribution feature allows agencies to formally designate themselves as the buying agency.
This is the end of the black box of ad spend. It brings accountability to the industry
Take a highly regulated giant like Diageo (Guinness, Smirnoff). In the "Wild West" era, ensuring compliance on organic TikTok posts was a nightmare of manual moderation.
With the new Registered Business Account safeguards, they can now apply Age-Gating at the account level. This allows them to deploy "Comfort Influencers" (our 2026 Trend #2) to tell authentic stories about cocktail culture, knowing that the distribution mechanism will automatically filter out under-age eyes. It’s safety by design, not by moderation.
While TikTok is verifying the business, who is verifying the influencers you hire to represent it? A Registered Business Account protects your owned channel, but it doesn't protect you from an influencer with 40% fake followers.
This is where Influencity’s IRM (Influencer Relationship Management) becomes the necessary counterpart.
Pro Tip: Use TikTok’s new business tools to manage your owned presence, but plug your influencer roster into Influencity to audit their audience authenticity before you let them take over your feed. Verification needs to happen at both ends of the handshake.
The Update: Partner Exchange on TikTok One & Creative for Smart+ (Auto-Select).
The Victorian printing press didn't kill the author, it scaled them. TikTok’s Set #2 is doing the same for ad creative. The Partner Exchange (formerly Creative Exchange) is now centralized in TikTok One, streamlining discovery and briefing. But the headline grabber is Creative for Smart+ with Auto-Select.
This feature scans your existing ads and eligible influencer content to automatically recommend and scale high-performing assets. It is algorithmic curation.
We are in the Era of Efficacy. We cannot afford to manually A/B test 500 pieces of creative. The Auto-Select feature for App campaigns is essentially an editor that never sleeps. It reads the room (the data) and decides which chapter (ad) to publish next.
Automotive marketing is notoriously heavy. It’s usually big TV spots cut down for mobile. But Toyota flipped the script using TikTok’s automation tools.
Thanks to integrating Smart+ with their lead generation strategy, Toyota runs ads while they running a system. They used the platform’s auto-optimization to serve different creative variants to users based on real-time signals.
They moved from "broadcasting" a car commercial to "narrowcasting" a solution to people ready to buy.
Clinique took it a step further with Smart+ Catalog Ads. Instead of manually creating an ad for every lipstick shade, they allowed the system to pull from their product catalog and match it with influencer assets.
These are the results compared to standard web campaigns. This proves that when you let the machine handle the matching, you free up your creative team to focus on the storytelling.
Automation is powerful, but garbage in = garbage out. Smart+ can only optimize the content you feed it. If your initial pool of creator content is weak, the algorithm can't save you.
Pro Tip: Use Influencity’s Discovery tools to find "Active Scouts", influencers with high engagement rates and niche authority. Commission them to create the raw assets (the "Lo-Fi" content). Then, feed those high-quality assets into TikTok’s Smart+ engine.
Human Creativity (sourced via Influencity) + Machine Distribution (via TikTok Smart+) = Scalable ROI.
The Update: Expanded Insights in Market Scope (Shop vs. Web Funnels).
In literature, an "omniscient narrator" knows everything, what the hero is thinking, what the villain is plotting, and what’s happening in the next town. Marketers have rarely had that luxury. We’ve had fragmented data, one dashboard for TikTok Shop, another for our e-commerce site.
Set #3 changes the game. TikTok Market Scope now allows commerce brands to view TikTok Shop and Website funnels side-by-side. It also introduces Title-Level Funnel Data for theatrical advertisers (movie studios) and Industry Analysis for Telcos.
This confirms our Trend #4: The Instant Funnel. For the first time, you can see exactly where the leakage is. Are users abandoning the cart on TikTok Shop because of shipping costs? Or are they bouncing from your website because of load times?
Movie marketing is high stakes. You have one opening weekend to make it work. Universal Pictures has been leveraging these deeper insights to track the journey from Trailer View to Ticket Purchase.
With the new Title-Level Data, studios can now track the awareness and consideration of a specific film (e.g., Minions & Monsters from our Super Bowl report) rather than just the studio account. This allows them to adjust the narrative in real-time. If the data shows high awareness but low consideration, they can swap the trailer for an influencer-led review that explains why the movie is worth seeing.
TikTok’s data is deep, but it’s a walled garden. It only tells you what happens on TikTok. Your customer doesn't live in a vacuum. They are also on Instagram, YouTube, and reading blogs.
Pro Tip: Use Influencity’s Campaign Reports to aggregate data across all platforms. Compare your TikTok data with your Instagram data . Are your Comfort Influencers performing better on TikTok or Reels? True omniscience requires stepping outside the walls of a single app.
The Update: Brand Consideration (Intent + View-Through) & Traffic Optimization.
The Messy Middle of the funnel is where brands usually die. It’s easy to get a cheap view. It’s hard to get a sale. The space between is a black hole. Set #4 introduces a new optimization model for Brand Consideration campaigns.
It balances Cost Per Consideration with 6-Second View-Through Rate. It also updates Traffic Campaigns to optimize for Cost Per New Buyer (targeting people who haven't bought in 180 days).
In Victorian serials, the "cliffhanger" was the mid-funnel mechanic. It was the device that ensured the reader didn't just consume the current chapter (View), but committed to buying the next one (Intent). TikTok is now algorithmically solving for the cliffhanger. It is prioritizing users who are likely to watch and think, not just scroll.
You don't buy a $1,200 smartphone on impulse. You need consideration. Brands like Samsung are moving away from traffic objectives (cheap clicks) to this new Brand Consideration objective.
By optimizing for View-Through Rate, they ensure that the user actually hears the value proposition, the battery life, the camera specs, the AI features. They are paying for attention span, not just eyeballs.
The mid-funnel is built on trust. A 6-second view-through is great, but who is keeping them watching?
Pro Tip: This is where B2B Creators and Tech Experts shine (Trend #5). Use Influencity to find creators with high "Audience Quality" scores, influencers whose followers actually listen to them. If you put a generic influencer in a Brand Consideration ad, people will skip. If you put a trusted expert (an "Active Scout" find) in that same ad, people will watch. Influencity identifies the voice; TikTok amplifies the signal.
The brands that will win this year are not the ones waiting for a viral miracle. They are the ones building infrastructure. They are the ones treating their creator program not as a casino, but as a supply chain.
As we move into Q2, I challenge you to look at your TikTok strategy. Are you still operating in the Wild West? Or are you ready to build an empire?
The tools are ready. The question is, are you?
Check out our full breakdown of the 2026 Influencer Marketing Trends Ebook, where we dive even deeper into the trends mentioned in this article.