4 Features That Show How Smart Brands Are Adapting to the Medium
By Paul Lima, founder of Lima Consulting Group
“The medium is the message.”
— Marshall McLuhan, media philosopher, 1964
McLuhan’s axiom is a principle that explains that media has the power to shape how we think, communicate and make decisions. While he was writing about television, he could have been describing TikTok. Fast-forward to today, and we’re watching younger generations form buying habits, social identities, and brand loyalty inside a feed that feels more like entertainment than commerce.
TikTok is to Gen Z as TV was to the Boomers.
Retail and entertainment have been merging since the late 1950s, with a major leap in 1982 when the Home Shopping Network hired charismatic entertainers to do entertaining product demos. But today, that concept has evolved from passive TV viewing into an interactive, data-driven, mobile-first experience where every swipe is a potential sale.
The algorithm is doing the job of a very good salesperson. It picks the merchandise, selects the influencer, selects products that are in inventory and can even do dynamic pricing based on geography and segment. So TikTok Shop is a powerful expression of how media, commerce, and culture are colliding.
Enter: Shoppertainment.
“Shopper-tainment” is a mash-up of shopping and entertainment. It’s a customer experience channel, a tool for top-of-funnel engagement, and increasingly, a way for most brands to advance in their customer experience and digital maturity.
Behind the creative videos and engaging personalities of the content creators lies a strategic opportunity for brands that are willing to adapt. Brands can activate first-party data, measure ad spend, and automate engagement at scale.
Getting Smart and Getting Return need to happen in real-time
At Lima Consulting Group, we’ve long used a framework called the Digital Transformation Maturity Model to help companies navigate this exact challenge. It’s built on two key dimensions:
- The X-axis, which we call Getting Smart, represents your Data Readiness Posture. It tracks how your data evolves — from simply knowing what happened (descriptive), to why it happened (diagnostic), to what will happen (predictive), to what should happen (prescriptive), and finally, to what can happen automatically (cognitive).
- The Y-axis, which we call Getting Return, reflects your ability to activate that intelligence. In other words: can you actually do something useful, and profitable, with what you know?
Just because someone has 3 PhDs doesn’t mean that they can make money. Knowledge doesn’t create value on its own; that’s why our mantra at LCG is to “apply innovation”. We need to “get smart” and “get return” by acing on our knowledge.
That’s where the power of platforms like TikTok Shop comes in. They not only can help marketers collect data, but they also have some really interesting ways to conduct social commerce in real-time so that brands can also convert that engagement into action. And what’s really interesting about TikTok Shop is all of this can be done within the platform.
TikTop Shop is a new kind of Storefront where data and activation can happen in real-time
So what is TikTok Shop and why should brands be pushing the limits of what is possible using these new innovations that they have recently released?
TikTok Shop is TikTok’s built-in social commerce platform that allows users to discover, review, and purchase products without ever leaving the app. It’s a full-service, end-to-end ecosystem that turns entertainment into transaction in real time.
At its core, TikTok Shop is a context engine. It leverages first-party data, machine learning, and creator-driven storytelling to deliver the right product, to the right person, at the right time — all while keeping them entertained. It’s where the feed becomes the storefront, and the algorithm becomes the merchandiser.
To succeed on platforms like TikTok Shop, brands need to adapt their marketing to work within new channels and mediums. TikTok Shop is redefining what it means to be a store.
Here are the four features TikTok Shop gurus are using:
- Deploy the TikTok Pixel on your digital properties. It captures high-value events like add to cart, purchase, view content, and complete payment. And you can add customer variables to it like product ID, price, category for more granular analysis. It also feeds back into TikTok’s optimization models to improve ad delivery and conversion attribution.
- Use Advanced Matching – This feature allows brands to send hashed identifiers such as email and phone number to maintain personalization while respecting privacy and compliance. This is how TikTok helps brands close the loop between unknown site traffic and logged-in TikTok users — turning anonymous clicks into known audiences.
- Use server-side tagging to make sure your tracking actually works. As browsers and privacy rules get stricter, traditional website tracking (like pixels) often get blocked or stripped of key data. Server-side tagging solves this by sending data directly from your server to TikTok bypassing blockers and giving you cleaner, more reliable signals. That means better targeting, smarter optimization, and fewer missed conversions.
- Use TikTok’s Catalog & Dynamic Ads to send real-time product catalogs and present Dynamic Product Ads (DPA) across organic and paid content. Your ads can appear in the TikTok feed and are shown based on user intent, segmentation by geography, inventory, and seasonality.
The Medium Has Become the Marketplace
The medium is the message. It was true of TV and it’s true of social commerce. TikTok is to Gen Z as TV was to the Boomers. The container of the medium shapes the experience more powerfully than you might think. It can change our sense, cognition, values, behavior and relationships, sometimes without its users even realizing it.
McLuhan warned us: the medium does much more than just carry information because it also is changing those who engage with it. Short form content changes how we interact, who we trust, and how we engage with brands. It offers social proof, peer validation and a sense of identity within smaller niche communities that speak to who we are.
It’s where the younger generation is forming opinions, exploring their values, and discovering products. But unlike TV, it’s actually the storefront where they are engaging with brands and completing transactions.
So marketers, take note: TikTok is more than media. It’s an infinite, intelligent storefront and a real-time test of your brand’s digital maturity, where you can both “get smart” and “get return” in one ecosystem, which is a rare combination of any social commerce platform.
TikTok Shop is “shopper-tainment.”
The feed is the funnel.
The scroll is the storefront.
And the medium — once again — is the message.
Paul Lima is the founder of Lima Consulting Group and a veteran of the US Army, where he helped establish cyberwarfare capabilities. A graduate of West Point with a master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania and Wharton, he is multilingual and hosts the podcast “The Visionary’s Guide to the Digital Future.
