Briefing a TikTok ad from trending search: fields and limits

To brief a TikTok ad from what is trending, call POST /v1/trending-videos/search with a product keyword. It returns ranked public TikTok metadata: watch URLs, cover thumbnails, author handles, metrics and relevance scores. It is research, not a generator, and it does not give you raw video files. In production, query is required and limit runs from 1 to 50.

What the search is for

Sume describes trending video search as a paid research utility. The MVP supports only platform: tiktok. You search by brand, product, creator or keyword, up to 200 characters, and you choose a window such as yesterday, this-week, this-month, last-3-months, last-6-months or all-time.

For a generic query in production the default window is this-month. For a product launch you will usually want this-week, because a hook that was fresh in spring is stale now.

Fields you will use

Each result carries a canonical public watch url, an optional cover_url, the description, created_at, region, the author's handle, metrics, relevance and scores. If you set summary_mode to metadata, you also get a light summary. The transcript mode currently returns metadata plus an unsupported warning, so do not build on it yet.

A small request

The body below asks for this week's top results for a product keyword in one region. Replace the keyword with the noun your buyer would type.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/trending-videos/search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "platform": "tiktok",
    "query": "cast iron skillet",
    "window": "this-week",
    "region": "US",
    "limit": 10,
    "summary_mode": "metadata"
  }'

From results to a brief

Read the descriptions and metrics, not the videos' pixels. Write down the opening line, the length and the one claim each top result makes. That gives you three or four hooks. Then write your own script, in your own words, for your own product.

Do not copy another creator's footage or script. The endpoint does not mirror videos either: the download and download_limit fields are reserved for a future workflow, and values above zero return an unsupported warning.