🔥 TikTok’s value spikes and Instagram rewires Stories
A big week for distribution. Instagram removes friction, TikTok’s US economics get clearer, and Pinterest sketches the next cultural wave.
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Hi friends!
This week, Instagram opened the gates on distribution by allowing anyone to reshare public Stories, a small change with real downstream impact. TikTok’s US economics also came into sharper focus, showing exactly why the platform continues to tilt itself toward commerce.
And in my interview with Jackie He, we get inside what actually worked and what didn’t during TikTok Shop’s BFCM cycle this year.
Also, Pinterest predicting escapism as the 2026 trend…
Let’s dig in.
Shoppers are adding to cart for the holidays
Over the next year, Roku predicts that 100% of the streaming audience will see ads. For growth marketers in 2026, CTV will remain an important “safe space” as AI creates widespread disruption in the search and social channels. Plus, easier access to self-serve CTV ad buying tools and targeting options will lead to a surge in locally-targeted streaming campaigns.
Read our guide to find out why growth marketers should make sure CTV is part of their 2026 media mix.
(December 9th)
🚨 Instagram Unlocks Full Story Resharing for the First Time
Instagram rolled out a major Stories update today. Users can now reshare any public Story to their own Story, even if they were never tagged in it. This changes the distribution math overnight. Story virality has always been bottlenecked by tagging friction. Removing that gate pushes Stories closer to a true discovery surface and gives creators, brands, and shoppers a new way to circulate moments at speed.
📊 US TikTok Users Deliver 4x More Ad Value Than the Global Average
Fresh data from eMarketer shows US TikTok users generate four times the ad value of the global baseline. Higher purchasing power and stronger advertiser demand in the US are reshaping TikTok’s revenue profile and accelerating its social commerce roadmap. For brands, this widens the gap between global TikTok strategy and US TikTok strategy. What works abroad is no longer a clean proxy for what will convert here. TikTok has every incentive to push deeper into US shopping behavior because the economics justify it.
🌈 Pinterest Predicts 2026 Will Be Driven by Nonconformity and Escapism
Pinterest’s annual trend forecast points toward a future built on self-preservation, niche expression, and escapist aesthetics. The platform is betting that audiences will keep drifting into smaller identity pockets and that brands win by speaking directly to those micro worlds. The takeaway for social commerce: conversion increasingly lives inside subcultures, not mass culture. Pinterest is mapping the long tail, and the long tail is where purchase intent is concentrating.
🎤 Interview
Jackie He: TikTok Shop Expert and owner of Reach Social Commerce Agency
Tobias Lindvall interview with Jackie He
Last week I interviewed Jackie He who has been in the TikTok ecosystem since 2021, long before TikTok Shop became the center of gravity. She started on the ads side, where scaling required an unforgiving volume of creatives. That experience made the shift in August 2023 impossible to miss.
A single viral seller pushed shoppable content into the algorithm’s spotlight and signaled that TikTok Shop wasn’t an add-on. It was the future. Jackie launched an agency in 2024 built entirely around Shop (Reach Social Commerce), and that focus has been the advantage.
“TikTok Shop stopped being a side channel the moment shoppable content outperformed everything else. You had to either commit or get left behind.”
The focus of the interview was around BFCM. She said Black Friday confirmed how fast the system is changing. What used to be a single high-pressure weekend has stretched into a two-and-a-half-week cycle. Sellers flipped on 50 percent discounts from day one, long before the official surge, and creators were pushed to ramp output as brands accelerated budgets early. Inside brand Discords you could see the shift in real time: teams telling creators to turn around forty videos because budgets were scaling faster than usual.
This flood of content and spend reshaped the dynamics. “Competition is way up. Supply is outpacing demand,” Jackie said. GMV rose across her accounts, but the lift was muted relative to the effort. With more sellers, deeper discounting, and heavier ad pressure, the algorithm had far more inventory to choose from. TikTok Shop rewarded activity, but not at the same multiplier brands saw last year. The takeaway is simple: BFCM is becoming a prolonged attention auction, and the brands that win are the ones planning around the entire cycle instead of banking on a single spike.
I also asked her what she thinks of the somewhat controversial GMV Max.
“GMV Max is the engine. When we turned it off, revenue stopped. People think it’s automated, but once budgets scale you’re adjusting ROI and creative signals almost hourly,” Jackie said.
The tool has become the quiet center of TikTok Shop. At smaller budgets it behaves like a simple accelerator, something you can set and leave alone. But as spend rises, GMV Max stops feeling automated and starts behaving like a manual campaign wrapped in automation. Every lever matters. ROI targets, dayparting, creator boosts, promo-day settings. Large brands are effectively living inside the tool during peak periods, tuning it the way media buyers once tuned performance campaigns. The mechanics are opaque, but the reality is not. If you want volume on TikTok Shop, you are operating inside GMV Max whether you acknowledge it or not.
I only got to ask Jackie two of my original questions so expect more to come 🙂
🧠 Brand Move of the Week
SKIMS Proved the Rule: Not Every Brand Belongs on TikTok Live
Kim Kardashian & Snoop Dog = Kimsmas
SKIMS pushed further into entertainment this week with Kimsmas Live, a forty five minute stream featuring Kim, Khloe, Kris, Kyle and Snoop on one stage. The production looked more like a holiday special than a commerce play. That was the point. It worked because it treated live as entertainment first and a sales channel second.
The numbers tell a different story. According to Marketing Dive, SKIMS moved roughly 920 units in the first twelve hours and a little over 3,000 by the next day. For a brand with Kardashian-level reach and TV-grade production, that volume does not justify the scale of investment. Any premium brand operating without that cultural gravity would see an even wider gap between cost and return.
@kimkardashian Kimsmas LIVE! Was definitely live and chaotic. Watch this moment when #KathyHilton showed up late…🤣 @SKIMS
Naysa Escobar captures the real tension. In China, she watched live shopping operate as a system built for constant volume. Studios running 24 hours a day. Hosts selling hundreds of SKUs. The machine works, but it compresses price integrity. Once a brand enters daily livestream cycles, AOV drops, margin erodes, and equity softens. You gain reach, but you pay a perception cost. You train your audience to expect more access and more deals.
SKIMS is one of the few brands with enough cultural weight to treat live as spectacle rather than throughput. For everyone else, the core question remains simple: does going live elevate the brand, or does it dilute the signal you are trying to protect?
Ok, see you next week. In the meantime, Sell! Sell! Sell! 🫡