Looking in-house for talent
College student interns who create TikTok content key to companies’ branding efforts
When Mary Clare Lacke, a 20-year-old student at the University of Missouri, interned at Claire’s in the summer, one of her tasks was to help the teen accessories company with its nascent TikTok account. It didn’t take long for her to produce a hit — though it wasn’t one that the retailer saw coming.
In an 11-second video, Lacke riffed off a pranking trend inspired by Kris Jenner to promote a style of the retailer’s earrings.
“My team was just like, ‘We’re not 100% sure what this is, but go for it,’ ” Lacke said. “And then it became the most successful video that the account has seen.”
The video generated 1.5 million views and 20,000 new followers for the company’s TikTok account.
Now Lacke is one of four new TikTok “college creators” working as interns for the brand during the school year, churning out fresh videos every week that they often star in themselves.
Making TikTok content for brands is the hot new gig. As the social media platform continues to explode in popularity, brands are hiring college students and other young people — sometimes with pay and sometimes with college credits — to help them navigate the app, which can confuse newcomers with its trending voice snippets and song clips, unique vernacular and endless videos.
Job sites have recently been peppered with listings for “TikTok content creator interns,” who are being asked to make and appear in videos promoting tropical ice cream, sunflower seeds, bubble tea, malls and more.
The hope is to connect with young people and even what some marketers call “Generation Zalpha” — combining the generations born after the mid-1990s with those born in 2010 and beyond — and ultimately drive sales.
Whole Foods and luggage company Travel Pro recently posted job ads for interns to help them build their presence on TikTok. A marketing agency in Dallas has been seeking a student to be its “chief TikTok officer” during the summer to help its clients with the app. And the Rosedale Center, a mall in Roseville, Minnesota, near Minneapolis, just hired two TikTok creator interns after successfully introducing the role last year.
Marketers have long turned to young people to help them navigate new social platforms. But their efforts with TikTok are unique partly because interns are becoming the face of those brands. The companies are keen to figure out an app that beat Instagram and Snapchat to become the most frequently used social media channel by 12- to 17-year-olds,
according to a Forrester Research survey last year. And in the past couple of years, some brands like Duolingo and Hasbro’s Nerf have hired people in Generation Z as full-time employees to take charge of their TikTok accounts, but they
are not the norm.
“If you think about the number of brands with a really strong TikTok presence, it’s less than a handful, compared to brands with a strong Instagram presence, which is literally everyone,” said Mae Karwowski, CEO
of influencer firm Obviously. “Video is so much harder for brands to do, and then the direct-face nature of TikTok doesn’t fit into their current models.
“It makes a lot of sense to hire people that are young and get it,” she added.