When you publish content on TikTok, the platform may identify your post as "branded" when it shows clear marketing intent. There are three requirements for marketing intent — all three elements must be present:
- Financial incentive: Your content includes URLs, promo codes, hashtags, collaboration mentions, QR codes, or overlay ads, which signals that you may be receiving money or benefits for promoting a product or service.
- Brand mention: You've used a branded hashtag (#brand), an official handle (@brand), or a brand logo in your video.
- Product recommendation: You're featuring or talking about a product or service in your content (e.g. demos, tutorials, or calls to action like "Buy now" or "Shop today" in your post).
Branded content disclosure refers to the clear and upfront labeling of content created in partnership with a business, indicating that the content is sponsored or promotional in nature.
Why do I need to disclose branded content?
If you’re getting paid, gifted, or otherwise rewarded to talk about a product or service on TikTok, you need to let your audience know that this content is promotional. TikTok has built-in disclosure tools that make this easy, and using them is an important part of following their Community Guidelines.
On top of TikTok’s rules, most countries (including the U.S.) have laws that require creators to be clear when a post is part of a brand partnership. These rules are there to keep things transparent and to make sure your audience doesn't feel misled. For example, in the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has guidelines for what counts towards the legal requirements for disclosure, such as including a Paid Partnership label, or a #sponsored hashtag.
Please keep in mind that if you do not properly disclose your branded content on TikTok, your post may not be eligible for distribution in the For You feed - which will impact your organic performance. If this happens, you'll receive a content moderation notification in the TikTok app. Clicking on this notification will take you through the steps to edit your post to include the necessary disclosure settings, or appeal the content flag.
How do I disclose branded content on TikTok?
You should use the TikTok Campaign Invite Link provided by your partnering brand
or agency to automatically apply all the necessary disclosure settings that will
keep you in compliance with TikTok's Community Guidelines. If you did not receive
a Campaign Invite Link from your partnering brand or agency, please
reach out to your Campaign Manager.
Tip: You can retroactively apply Campaign Invite Links to posts that have already been published, allowing you to avoid or address content moderation flags!
Will disclosing branded content impact my engagement?
Any posts that have branded content disclosures enabled will be distributed the same way as non-branded content, and can also still be run as a Spark Ads.
That's why turning on branded content disclosure won't change your video performance - TikTok ran studies in 2023 and 2025 comparing videos with and without proper branded content disclosure and found branded content outperforms other content in terms of total views, organic views, and organic engagement count.
And lastly, when boosted as Spark Ads, branded content is 44.5% more efficient when it comes to CPM (or Cost per Thousand Impressions) than non-branded content!