As part of its ongoing efforts to improve its in-app shopping experience, TikTok has joined the International Trademark Association's (INTA) “Unreal” campaign, which aims to raise awareness about counterfeits, and deter people from being duped by fake listings.
The Unreal campaign, which has already been running for over a decade, aims to educate young consumers about the importance of intellectual property, trademarks and brands, and the dangers of purchasing counterfeit products. The initiative is available to all INTA members, across 181 countries, providing capacity for individual sessions and tools to help raise awareness of related concerns.
And now, TikTok will also be looking to help amplify the program’s messging.
As explained by TikTok:
“In May 2025, TikTok and INTA launched a year-long campaign to empower young shoppers with the knowledge they need to make mindful purchasing decisions and understand the serious risks linked to counterfeit goods. Through a series of engaging TikTok videos and articles released throughout the year, the campaign will shed light on the wide ranging risks of counterfeit products.”
TikTok says that this is part of its broader effort to take a stand to protect intellectual property rights, and ensure that TikTok users aren’t being manipulated in the app, which can lead to a bad shopping experience.
TikTok has been pushing its in-stream shopping options as hard as it can, with a range of promotions of live-stream shopping events, in particular, as it seeks to replicate the success it saw with the same in China.
The Chinese version of TikTok, called Douyin, now generates the vast majority of its revenue from in-stream shopping, and it’s seen astronomical growth in live shopping, which TikTok has sought to also boost in its app.
But Western audiences thus far haven’t been as interested, which has put a dampener on TikTok’s earnings potential. But it is still trying, and it’s seemingly still confident that it can make TikTok shopping a significant element, and bring more opportunities for the platform and businesses alike.
Protecting IP is another piece of this puzzle, enabling TikTok to put more emphasis on buying from approved sellers, as opposed to undercutting them by showcasing fakes.
Which is hard to police, but ideally, this new partnership will expand TikTok’s capacity by helping shoppers understand what to look for in product listings.
For its part, TikTok says that it removed more than 450k products for intellectual property violations between July and December 2024, and the job of enforcing its rules on this front is expanding with its broader shopping push. So TikTok is also working to actively enforce the same, but ideally, more users raising more awareness will also assist.
