TikTok's algorithm barely needs your audience settings — it reads the video itself and the first seconds of viewer behaviour, then finds the people who respond. Make the right thing and distribution takes care of itself; make the wrong thing and no targeting will save it.
That makes the hook the entire economy. You have roughly one second to earn the next three, and three to earn thirty. Winning accounts don't guess at this — they manufacture hooks in variants, read the retention curves, and iterate weekly at a pace older platforms never demanded.
The format rewards native and punishes polish: content that feels found, not placed. When something catches organically, Spark Ads pour fuel on it without breaking the illusion — the platform's own mechanism for scaling authenticity.