She has garnered over 700,000 followers, millions of views on her company’s TikTok, and a matching tattoo with her boss, but this is only the beginning for Gen Z marketing prodigy Jony Lee of The Attention Seeker.
The job description sounds simple – make 10 TikToks a day. That’s it. To some it sounds like a pretty easy job, but to make content that resonates is much harder than it sounds.
Dialling in from a co-working space in New York, Jony tells NZ Marketing she never expected to land the Gen Z dream career, creating content on TikTok, when branding agency The Attention Seeker took a chance on her after realising marketing was heading into previously uncharted territory.
“You collect a lot of data from what you put out, see what works, what doesn’t work, and then learning in the sense of processes,” she says.
“We always had the saying, throw sh*t at the wall.Through that process of doing literally everything that came out of my brain and trying to execute on everything, that’s how I began to learn what works.”
What stuck were TikToks that had a storyline. This formula got the audience’s attention and eventually grew a following for the company.
Jony’s presentation TikToks are the most successful, with millions of views.
Catchphrases like “kweschuns” (questions) and “konsernz” (concerns) quickly became synonymous with the brand, even resulting in Jony getting this as a matching tattoo with her boss.
This all worked because Jony says they were able to mix two types of content: audience acquisition and audience service.
“Audience acquisition are all the things that you think will maybe go viral. When you do an acquisition, you say it’s with intention,” she explains.
“This is all intentional stuff, not accidental viral stuff. So, our presentations at the end have a call to action or a reason for them to follow to see what happens next. It’s a cliffhanger of some sort.”
Audience servicing is the content that maintains the connection through audience acquisition and can be seen through comment reply TikToks, promises, and people getting to know a character.
“You have to keep doing both [and] having a good mix,” she says.
The success of her TikToks helped them attract some high-profile clients such as One NZ, which after seeing
her content, wanted a campaign to follow suit.
Using this recipe for success, The Attention Seeker was able to ideate, film, edit and distribute a campaign for One NZ, which followed this content mix; a One NZ employee reading hate comments and a presentation to the CEO, Jason Paris.
“A little secret, I planted the comment ‘Jason Paris is a daddy’. People thought it would not catch on, but when I edited it, put it in and posted it, the comments were flooded with #DaddyParis,” she reveals.
The results speak for themselves with this becoming the highest engaged top view ads (an ad first seen when the TikTok app is open) in the APAC region at the time.
Only a year in, she and the team at The Attention Seeker are expecting this success to continue to grow even further as she meets with big companies and other popular creators in North America.
It is safe to say in 2024 we will be seeing a lot more of the TikTok prodigy, Jony, who no doubt has many more tricks up her sleeve.
This article was first published in our December/January 2023/2024 issue.
