Analyze thousands of tiktoks to provide actionable trends & insights for key agencies. (Worked on multi-modal content understanding) To be released on TikTok Creative Center (https://ads.tiktok.com/business/creativecenter/pc/en)

Credits: TikTok Creative Team

TikTok Insight Spotlight Launches at Advertiser Summit

Jun 3 - Excited to share that TikTok Insight Spotlight, a product I worked on during my time at TikTok, was officially unveiled at the company’s annual advertiser summit on June 3rd, 2025. The Verge covered the launch extensively, highlighting the AI-driven capabilities I helped develop.

TikTok’s Insight Spotlight interface showing AI-generated analysis - a product I contributed to while at TikTok

As The Verge reported: “TikTok introduced a slew of new advertiser tools at the company’s annual advertiser summit on June 3rd. The new products range from AI-powered ad tools to new features connecting creators and brands, but the overall picture is clear: advertiser content on TikTok is about to become much more tailored and specific.”

The article specifically highlighted the core functionality I worked on: “The company will give brands precise details about how their target audience is using the platform — including AI-generated suggestions on ads to run. Using a tool called Insight Spotlight, advertisers will be able to sort by user demographics and industry to see what videos users in the target group are watching and what keywords are associated with popular content.”

Behind the Product:

During my time at TikTok, I worked specifically on the multi-modal content understanding capabilities that power Insight Spotlight’s core functionality. Here’s how the features I helped develop work in practice:

AI-Generated Content Recommendations

The Verge highlighted a key example of the system in action: “In an example provided by TikTok, an AI-generated suggestion recommends that a brand ‘produce video content focused on ‘hormonal health’ for female, English-speaking users’ and to include a specific keyword.” This type of precise, data-driven recommendation is made possible by the multi-modal analysis systems I contributed to.

Trend Prediction Through Content Analysis

As The Verge noted: “Another feature in Insight Spotlight analyzes users’ viewing history to identify types of content that are bubbling up.” This capability stems from the advanced content understanding work I did, which enables the system to analyze both visual and audio elements of videos to predict emerging trends before they become mainstream.

The article captures the significance of this shift: “TikTok rose in prominence partly because of its spin-the-wheel, seemingly random quality: anything or anyone could go viral overnight. Brands did their best to keep up by jumping on trends, using popular formats and songs, and partnered with influencers who seemed to be at the center. The new tools will give advertisers even more ways to specifically tailor their content toward what is already happening on the platform and what people are searching for and watching.”

My work on multi-modal content understanding was focused on making this transition from random virality to predictable, data-driven insights possible. By analyzing thousands of TikToks across visual, audio, and textual dimensions, we created a system that can identify patterns and provide actionable recommendations to advertisers.

Platform-as-Search-Engine Vision

The Verge perfectly captured the broader vision: “In this way, advertiser tools are TikTok’s equivalent of search engine optimization (SEO) — flooding the zone with content that attempts to capture organic user behaviors. The idea that TikTok can be used as a search engine has been around for several years, and the company says that one in four users search for something within 30 seconds of opening the app.”

This transformation from entertainment platform to search-driven insights tool represents our team’s work - using AI to understand not just what content performs, but why it performs and how brands can leverage those insights.

Beyond Data: The Evolution of AI-Driven Insight Products for Content Creation

Introduction: The Shifting Landscape of Creative AI Tools

In the rapidly evolving space of AI-driven creative tools, we’re witnessing a significant transition from general-purpose large language models to specialized, task-specific agent systems. This shift represents a fundamental change in how AI approaches creative work, particularly in advertising and marketing.

While many current GenAI applications focus heavily on content generation capabilities, the true creative bottleneck often isn’t in the generation step itself. Rather, it lies in the quality of insights that inform and guide the creative process. Without meaningful data and analysis, even the most sophisticated generation tools produce generic, uninspired content.

This blog explores how data insight products are evolving alongside generative AI technologies, and how their integration could fundamentally transform content creation workflows.

The Evolution of AI Capabilities

The limitations of general-purpose large language models have become increasingly apparent when handling complex creative tasks. To address issues like hallucinations and improve task completion capabilities, the industry has largely reached a consensus around agent-based approaches.

Different types of agent workflows have emerged to address specific needs. Non-agentic workflows generate content linearly without backtracking, suitable for straightforward tasks. Reflection-based systems introduce iterative improvement cycles where the AI criticizes and refines its own outputs. Tool use capabilities enable function calls and web browsing for enhanced research capabilities.

More advanced systems implement planning algorithms that decompose complex tasks into manageable steps, similar to how human creators break down projects. At the frontier, multi-agent collaboration enables specialized AI agents to work together, each handling different aspects of a complex creative process.

This evolution toward more sophisticated agent architectures reflects a growing understanding that creative work isn’t linear—it requires iteration, refinement, and the ability to leverage different capabilities at different stages of the process.

The Workflow Challenge

One of the key limitations in current AI creative products is their focus on isolated capabilities rather than integrated workflows. In the advertising and marketing industry, there’s a high concentration of AI tools, but most provide only single functions or partial capabilities.

A content creator typically needs to move through multiple stages: gathering insights, analyzing competitors, developing concepts, generating scripts, creating visual assets, and optimizing the final product. Currently, this requires juggling multiple disconnected tools, manually transferring context between them, and piecing together a cohesive workflow.

Users don’t simply need better individual tools—they need comprehensive workflows that connect these steps seamlessly. The value proposition shifts from “what can this AI do?” to “how does this AI fit into my creative process?” This represents a fundamental shift in how we should design and evaluate AI creative systems.

Market Analysis of Insight Products

The current market for insight products shows several distinct categories, each addressing different aspects of the creative process. Here’s a structured analysis of the landscape:

Ad Compilation Tools

Products in this category focus on collecting, organizing, and analyzing existing advertisements across platforms. Pipi Ads maintains a library of over 20 million TikTok ads with extensive filtering capabilities, allowing users to study successful campaigns and identify trending approaches. Foreplay offers a more workflow-oriented solution, enabling users to save ads from multiple platforms, organize them with custom tags, and build creative briefs based on existing successful content.

The value proposition of these tools centers on learning from what already works. By studying high-performing ads, creators can identify patterns and strategies that resonate with specific audiences. However, most of these tools stop at the analysis stage without directly connecting insights to content generation.

Competitor Analysis Tools

Tools like Social Peta, Big Spy, and Story Clash provide deeper analysis of competitive activities. Social Peta offers insights into content distribution across 69 countries and 70 networks, analyzing multimedia types and dimensions. Big Spy enables cross-network ad searching with multiple filters, while Story Clash specializes in TikTok influencer tracking and performance analysis.

The competitive analysis market has grown substantially with the rise of social media advertising, with new players continuously entering the space to address specialized niches and platforms. These tools typically provide dashboard interfaces with various filters for monitoring competitor strategies, but most lack direct integration with content creation workflows.

Brand Insight Tools

Social listening platforms like Springklr, Exolyt, and Keyhole monitor brand mentions and sentiment across social channels. These tools analyze both posts and comments, providing valuable data on how audiences perceive brands and their content. Springklr offers comprehensive post and comment analysis with sentiment tracking, while Exolyt specializes in TikTok-specific insights, comparing brand content with user-generated content.

Keyhole delivers profile analytics, social trend monitoring, and campaign tracking. These tools excel at capturing the audience’s voice and identifying shifts in perception, but typically require significant manual analysis to translate these insights into actionable creative strategies.

Performance Analysis Tools

Platforms such as Social Insider, Motion App, and RivalQ focus on analyzing ad performance metrics. These tools help marketers understand what content performs best, with detailed analytics on engagement, conversion, and return on investment. By identifying high-performing content patterns, these tools can inform future creative decisions.

However, there remains a significant gap between identifying what works and automatically generating new content based on those insights. Most performance analysis tools remain separated from content creation workflows, requiring manual interpretation and application of insights.

Deep Dive: Notable Products

Several standout products illustrate different approaches to the insight-generation challenge:

TikBuddy: Platform-Specific Analysis

TikBuddy focuses exclusively on TikTok analytics, offering creator rankings by category, follower count, and growth rate. The tool provides comprehensive account performance monitoring and video data analysis through a convenient Chrome extension.

Its specialized focus allows for deeper platform-specific insights, but its utility is limited to a single platform and doesn’t extend to content creation. Users must manually apply any insights gained to their creative process.

Foreplay: Workflow Integration

Foreplay stands out for its more integrated workflow approach. The platform enables users to collect ad content across platforms, preserve it even after platform deletion, and organize it with tags and categories. Its brief creation tools facilitate the transition from insight to execution, with support for brand information and specific generation requirements.

The platform’s AI storyboard generator creates hooks and develops scripts based on collected insights. Foreplay also integrates discovery features organized by community, brand, and experts, alongside competitor monitoring capabilities.

This approach begins to bridge the gap between insights and creation, though the integration remains partial rather than fully automated.

Keyhole: Deep Analytics

Keyhole exemplifies the analytics-focused approach, tracking keywords and brand mentions with temporal context. The platform offers detailed post analysis, influencer identification, trending topics visualization, and profile analytics with optimization recommendations.

Its strength lies in comprehensive data collection and visualization, but like many analytics platforms, it requires significant human interpretation to translate insights into creative decisions.

Emerging Innovations in Data Insight Products

The data insight landscape continues to evolve rapidly, with several notable innovations emerging:

Open source projects like Vanna are revolutionizing text-to-SQL capabilities, making database querying more accessible to non-technical users. These tools enable creators to extract specific insights from complex datasets without specialized database knowledge.

Recent startups are developing interactive data dashboards that visualize complex datasets in more intuitive ways, allowing for easier pattern identification and insight extraction. These tools employ advanced visualization techniques to make data more accessible and actionable.

User feedback aggregation tools are also gaining traction, automatically summarizing and categorizing customer sentiment from reviews and comments. These systems can identify common themes and concerns, providing valuable input for content creators looking to address audience needs.

The most promising innovations focus on reducing the cognitive load required to extract meaningful insights from data, making the path from analysis to action more direct and intuitive.

The Future: Insight-Driven Content Generation

The next evolution in creative AI tools will likely center on high-quality content generation based on data insights. Current GenAI applications often produce unnecessary content redundancy—different from hallucinations, but equally problematic for effective communication.

The real creative barrier isn’t typically in the generation process itself, but in the prompts—the insights that inform decision-making. When using agent-based systems, the quality of instructions and background information directly impacts the output quality.

For example, advanced AI systems can now decompose complex goals like “How can a lifestyle channel creator get 1,000 subscribers on YouTube?” into specific tasks: analyzing successful channels, generating targeted content ideas, and implementing optimization strategies. However, the quality of these recommendations depends entirely on the AI’s access to relevant, accurate data about what actually works.

By leveraging sophisticated content analysis, we can identify truly effective patterns in high-performing content. Multimodal understanding can reveal why certain creative approaches resonate with specific audiences, providing creators with concrete, unique insights rather than generic advice.

The future lies in connecting these insights directly to the generation process—using what we know works as the foundation for creating new content that maintains brand uniqueness while leveraging proven patterns.

Conclusion: The Integration Opportunity

Compared to other GenAI creative tools, insight products place greater emphasis on data quality and quantity. The next leap in AI-generated content quality will likely come from precise generation guided by robust insight data.

The most promising opportunity lies in creating systems that can automatically analyze successful content across platforms, extract meaningful patterns from this analysis, and directly translate these insights into generation guidance. This approach would produce highly targeted content that leverages proven patterns while maintaining brand distinctiveness.

As we move forward, the focus will shift from mere information generation toward sophisticated information synthesis—providing not just content, but content informed by actionable insights derived from real-world performance data. Organizations that successfully integrate insight gathering with content generation will gain a significant competitive advantage in an increasingly crowded digital landscape.

The future belongs not to those with the most powerful generative models, but to those who can effectively transform data into creative insight, and insight into compelling content.