With TikTok’s usage still climbing across Southeast Asia and advertising revenues surging, the short-video platform TikTok is making a concerted effort to court app marketers in the region and grow their ad spending beyond performance marketing.
At their first-ever Apps Summit in Hanoi last week, TikTok held a media briefing that not only showed off their user and engagement metrics for the region, but also identified a shift in SEA app usage that makes this segment an increasingly important part of the platform’s advertising base.
“TikTok is increasingly becoming the home of app advertising,” said Nikhil Rolla, who heads Strategic Accounts for SEA and leads the TikTok business for Malaysia, pointing out how major app verticals like travel apps, local services and finance are TikTok’s growing app client categories alongside gaming, which traditionally has dominated the space.
In fact, new data from Sensor Tower shows that in 2025 non-gaming mobile apps have pulled ahead in SEA as the leader for both spending and downloads for the first time. For TikTok, this means that the field of app marketers is broadening along with the types of marketing they might need.
TikTok revealed that its number of app clients has risen dramatically over the past year, with return on ad spend for these advertisers growing 87% in the past two years after heavy investments in ad tools, including AI-led automation products around optimisation, ad targeting, bidding, delivery and reporting.
Now, TikTok’s aim is to widen the scope of app marketing from its preoccupation with downloads, to supporting the underlying businesses behind already downloaded apps.
“A lot of app marketers have a performance marketing mindset, and results-driven marketing is [a natural way] they should think. We’re also trying to educate apps to think about performance in a more holistic way,” Rolla told Campaign in an interview at the summit. We’ve spoken to mature apps who explained they were initially heavily focused on performance but then very quickly realised that they need to move full-funnel because they need to move into demand generation and not just demand capture.”
Case in point might be travel and experiences app Klook, which uses TikTok to reach its 70-80% mobile millennial and Gen Z audience. Since its focus is more on experiences, Klook needs a wider variety of content to draw its audiences into the attention and consideration phases, rather than simply offering discounted airline tickets to make a sale.
“In the first few years of growth, just like any startup company, we were always chasing growth,” said Marcus Yong, Klook’s VP of global marketing. “That means over-indexing on demand capture, so everything was about last-click ROAS. But after a while, especially in mature markets you realise you’re not really growing the pie, just cannibalising the same pie.”
Despite admitting challenges inherent in presenting monthly and quarterly returns with full-funnel marketing, Klook’s marketing team therefore broadened out with its first mid-to-upper funnel brand campaign earlier this year. Called ‘The Best You’, it brought in Netflix star Marie Kondo to run a series of videos to find her ‘best you’ when travelling.
@klooktravel Marie Kondo is known for sparking joy… but what happens when she lets loose and just has fun? �� At RED Tokyo Tower — Japan’s largest next-gen digital playground — Marie steps out of her comfort zone and into a robot suit, where she tries out a few dance moves (yes, really ��). For someone used to order and control, this moment of pure, playful chaos is something completely new — and totally joyful. This is the second of three episodes in her journey to discover The Best You — Klook’s new campaign that reimagines travel not just as an escape, but as a path to personal growth through bold, joy-filled experiences. ��RED Tokyo Tower | Available on the Klook App �� Discover The Best You at ExperienceTheBestYou.com #Klook #KlookTravel #TheBestYouKlook #MarieKondo ♬ original sound - Klook
“We cut that into thousands of different pieces of content, and then we pushed that out through different local handles. When people interacted with the content, we brought them to a campaign site for an individual personality quiz to discover what ‘the best you’ for them looked like and what their next trip should be. That gives us a lot of data points.”
The campaign so far has an ad recall and awareness lift of more than 5% and a led to a conversion lift of 14.5%, but Yong says the real test will be in this peak travel season when they’re hoping the mid-year content translates into a greater curve in Q4.
Even gaming apps which traditionally have relied on performance marketing have begun to see the need for more full-funnel approaches to grow demand. Chris Liu, head of business development and partnerships at Vietnamese gaming firm VNG Games explained how their effort to bring younger audiences to one of their older games, Metal Slug, involved pre-launch registrations, new creative videos as well challenges for the community to create better video content. At the same time, it pushed existing user-generated content about the game on TikTok to others. In the end, it ultimatelyy beat its install targets but also exceeded on engagement levels on the way through the funnel to that result.
“You really have to consider that mid-to-upper funnel, because without that you’re not unleashing the platform to its full potential,” Liu said.
The battle for attention
Beyond acquiring and retaining new customers, a key part of TikTok’s pitch to app marketers was to address some of their other challenges, like fragmented attention. With today’s users using multiple apps in a single session, it’s hard for apps to cut through the clutter.
Indeed, as VNG’s Liu lamented, apps like TikTok compete for the attention of gamers and pull their eyeballs away from playing games. Looking deeper into it, Liu and his team saw how younger generations like to do two or three things at once. “Time and experience is a very different focus for them,” Liu said. This led VNG to look at their business in a new way, with younger gamers preferring more casual games that don’t take a lot of time and money, but can be played while multitasking.
“Now we realise our traditional marketing practices are not having the same effect anymore,” said Liu. “We need to actually engage with users, capture their hearts and feelings and help them engage with each other also.” Hence, their proclivity for a platform that lets people create their own content and share with one another.
Ultimately, TikTok’s pitch to app marketers on the problem of attention is that they have higher engagement levels compared to other platforms in SEA, according to SensorTower data. Its message, in effect, is ‘if you can’t beat us, join us.’
Authenticity vs calculation
Joining TikTok, however, requires excelling at authentic content, something that app marketers can struggle with as much as traditional marketers. Rolla says this is still the most consistent theme that marketers across all verticals raise with him, “and it’s absolutely the right question to ask because as a brand you want to blend into that user-generated content as seamlessly as possible.”
And herein lies the conundrum. Marketers are trained to think strategically, to research their target audience, look at the data, map out a full-funnel strategy and utilise the platform tools effectively. It’s generally the right approach, but doing the right thing can also lead to doing the wrong thing.
While Liu advocates methodically signaling to users and testing everything, one of the biggest differences they saw in their marketing was when they changed those who ran their TikTok videos from people in their 30s to those in their 20s.
“I think it's really important that when you're making these TikTok videos, you're not going in there with a mind of people like us business guys who's like, how can I get the most users? How can I get the most views? How can I get the best ROI?” Liu said.
“You want a young person saying: ‘Hey, I want to make a cool video. I want to engage with my friends. I want to engage with people like me who love this content. Then you will get your views.”
