70% Faster Setup, 60% Less Creative Work: How StardustTV Built Its TikTok Minis Operation on XMP

StardustTV is the global short drama brand of Shanhai Group, one of China's leading short drama platforms. Today, StardustTV has released 12,000+ titles in 14 languages across 200+ countries and regions, with monthly active users surpassing 10 million. In Q1 2026, StardustTV's revenue from its TikTok Minis partnership grew rapidly, making it a leading player in the global short drama market.

Despite the rapid growth opportunity on TikTok Minis, StardustTV faced increasing operational pressure as campaign volume and creative testing scaled up. Managing a growing number of ads and creative assets manually made it harder to maintain speed and efficiency in daily operations. To scale in a fast-moving environment, the team needed a more efficient way to manage performance advertising.

How StardustTV Rebuilt the TikTok Minis Workflow with XMP

Centralized Operations: 70% Faster Campaign Launches

TikTok Minis introduced a faster launch and optimization cycle for mini series campaigns. As StardustTV expanded its presence on the platform, the number of campaigns, ad groups, and creative variations grew rapidly. Manual workflows that relied on repetitive setup and fragmented management tools began to slow execution, making it difficult for the team to respond quickly during critical traffic windows.

To address the rapid scaling of campaign volume, StardustTV used XMP to centralize TikTok Minis campaign operations into a unified management system. Instead of manually building campaigns one by one, the team could standardize campaign setup, bulk launch ad groups, and manage optimization workflows in a structured way.

What previously took over 2 hours per campaign now runs in under 40 minutes, freeing the team to spend setup time on creative iteration instead. During high-traffic periods, the team can spin up new campaigns within the same shift, keeping pace with TikTok Minis' rapid launch-and-test cycle.

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Tag-Based Creative Library: Reuse, Compound, Scale

Performance on TikTok Minis depends heavily on continuous creative iteration. Different hooks, episode cuts, captions, thumbnails, and storytelling styles often need to be tested in parallel to identify winning combinations. However, without a centralized creative management system, assets became difficult to organize, reuse, and analyze efficiently. This made large-scale testing more time-consuming and reduced the speed of optimization cycles.

To solve creative fragmentation and inefficiency in testing, StardustTV's team rebuilt its creative library on XMP, organizing all ad assets in a tag-based structure.

Creatives such as episode cuts, hooks, thumbnails, and captions were no longer managed in isolation. Instead, they were categorized, reused, and linked to performance data, enabling the team to quickly identify winning patterns and scale successful campaigns. Within the first 3 months on XMP, the team cut down duplicated creative testing across drama titles.

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AI Assistant: Real-Time Decisions Across the Account

As campaign pacing accelerated, ROAS volatility increased: a creative that drove 3x return in the morning could drop below break-even by afternoon. The old reporting cadence (pull data, build a sheet, meet, adjust) was too slow to catch these swings. Teams needed to monitor results closely and make optimization decisions much faster than before.

StardustTV moved its day-to-day optimization onto XMP's AI assistant. The assistant monitors performance data across campaigns, creatives, accounts, and tags, allowing the team to quickly identify high-performing assets and underperforming combinations, respond faster to performance changes, and maintain stable scaling under high campaign volume.

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Results

• 70% Increase in Campaign Creation Efficiency

StardustTV significantly reduced manual setup and operational workload across TikTok Minis campaigns by centralizing TikTok Minis campaign operation XMP, enabling faster launch and smoother daily management.

• 60% Less Time Spent on Creative Management

With XMP's Creative Library and Tag Library, StardustTV could organize, reuse, and analyze creative assets more efficiently, simplifying creative handling and performance review.

Don't just take our word for it!

"TikTok Minis has opened up new growth opportunities for our mini series business, and at the same time set a higher bar for how we run ad operations. With XMP, we cut down repetitive work like campaign setup and creative uploads, made it easier for the team to coordinate day to day, and moved faster to act on new traffic windows."

—— StardustTV UA Team

With XMP, StardustTV streamlined campaign operations and creative management, enabling faster execution and more efficient scaling on TikTok Minis. Moving forward, XMP will continue to support UA teams with more automation and AI-assisted optimization, helping advertisers scale output without scaling headcount.