As the light fades across the bay, I keep coming back to the event’s theme: Human Connection & Intelligent Marketing. It feels exactly right for the moment we are in, and for the conversations I had throughout the day with marketers, media leaders, agencies, technologists and fellow measurement obsessives.

Across the stages, booths and corridor conversations, the same questions kept surfacing. How do we use AI without losing human creativity? How do we build brands when attention is fragmented? How do we prove marketing’s value when business conditions keep shifting? How do we make better decisions when the data we have only tells part of the story?

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For us at Analytic Partners, these questions are very real. They are the questions we help marketers answer every day.

That’s why, on our booth, we invited delegates to sit down with real-life modellers to ask their burning questions about data, dashboards and Marketing Mix Modelling. Mikael Dannerstedt, AVP Asia; Zhesen Tong, Director Asia and Evelyn Liao, Senior Marketing Science Analyst, spent the day speaking with marketers who want to understand what their dashboards might be missing, how MMM really works and how to make better budget decisions in a volatile market.

It is a simple idea, but a useful one. Put a marketer in front of a modeller and the conversation very quickly becomes practical.

Unsurprisingly, people want to know how to measure the impact of brand. How to understand what is really driving sales. How to avoid over-crediting lower-funnel channels. How to explain marketing’s contribution to finance. How to respond when a plan that makes sense six months ago suddenly feels out of date.

They also wanted to win our CMO Survival Kit, containing a Diptyque candle, Ostrich sleep mask, Bacha coffee sachets, TWG herbal teas, de-stressing pillow spray and our exclusive “I’ve Got No Budget” enamel pins, designed to protect marketers from predatory vendors at events. (That last part is, mostly, a joke.) To do so they had to subscribe to The CMO Office and I am delighted to announce today’s winner is:

Congratulations Nishant, may your coffee be luxurious, your sleep mask effective and your budget pin a powerful shield against overly enthusiastic sales pitches.

We signed up 20 new subscribers today, which is a lovely result. It also reminds me that marketers are still hungry for practical, useful, commercially grounded insight. Less noise. Less jargon. Fewer dashboards for the sake of dashboards. More insight they can actually use.

When the plan stops reflecting reality

That question of how to respond when a plan made six months ago suddenly feels out of date was also at the heart of my keynote on the learning stage: Your Marketing Isn’t Built for What’s Coming.

My message was a direct one. Many 2026 marketing plans are already obsolete.

That may sound rather blunt, but look at the world marketers are planning for. Conflict is affecting trade, fuel costs and consumer sentiment. Inflation continues to influence household decisions. Supply chains remain fragile. AI is reshaping expectations. Platforms are fragmenting. Consumers across Southeast Asia are behaving in increasingly different ways depending on market, income, category and context. Yet many marketing plans are still built around assumptions made months ago, sometimes nearly a year ago!

The danger lies in the invisibility of those assumptions. A plan can still look beautifully organised in a spreadsheet. A dashboard can still show clicks, conversions and engagement. A campaign can still appear to be performing. Meanwhile, the commercial reality around it may have changed completely, which is where marketers need to broaden their view.

Marketing does not operate in a vacuum. It is affected by pricing, distribution, availability, competitor behaviour, category demand, macroeconomic pressure, media inflation and shifts in consumer confidence. Measurement that fails to account for those forces risks giving marketers confidence in an incomplete picture.

Why marketers need a wider lens

Our ROI Genome global campaign database shows why this matters. Marketing is directly responsible for 5% - 20% of key business outcomes in APAC such as sales or new customer acquisitions, which means a large share of growth comes from factors outside marketing, including availability, consumer trends and macroeconomic forces. That does not diminish marketing’s role but it demonstrates precisely why we need to measure it properly.

When marketers want a stronger voice in the boardroom, we need to show how marketing interacts with the whole business. We need to understand where marketing is driving growth, where external factors are helping or hurting performance, and where different choices could produce better outcomes.

That is where Marketing Mix Modelling becomes so valuable. Used well, MMM helps marketers move beyond post-campaign reporting and towards forward-looking decisioning. It can show what is really driving performance, how channels work together, where diminishing returns are appearing and how a plan should change when the market changes.

Southeast Asia does not move as one

This feels especially relevant after reading commentary from Rica Facundo, Managing Editor at WARC APAC, on findings from the Mastercard Economics Institute presented at Omnicom Media Asia Pacific’s recent OM Forward event.

The findings underline something every regional marketer should be paying attention to: economic pressure produces divergence.

That is the reality of marketing in Southeast Asia. The region does not move as one. Consumers do not respond to pressure in the same way. Categories behave differently. Channels play different roles in each market. A regional average can easily hide the most important parts of the story.

The marketers who adapt will have the advantage

☝️That, ultimately, is my biggest takeaway from Campaign360.

Marketing plans cannot be built once a year and left untouched while the world changes around them. The pace of change across Southeast Asia makes that too risky. The marketers who perform best in 2026 will be those who keep updating their view of the market, connect their measurement to business outcomes and make sharper decisions as conditions evolve.

The future will reward the marketers who know when the plan has stopped being true and we can be your source of truth.

Find Your Truth

This is a category where the stakes are high. Decisions carry real financial consequences, and trust is everything. That makes marketing both more powerful and more accountable.

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Jason brings a thoughtful, commercially grounded perspective. We talk about why traditional measurement approaches often fall short, and how marketers need to take a broader view of performance because too many organisations still rely on fragmented metrics that miss the full picture of how marketing drives growth .

A big theme in our conversation is the role of brand. In financial services, brand is not a distant, long-term play - it directly shapes short-term outcomes, from conversion to retention. Jason reveals how stronger brand equity makes every other marketing investment work harder, amplifying performance rather than competing with it .

We also discuss what this means in practice at Endowus. How do you balance brand and performance? How do you ensure your marketing builds credibility, not just attention? And how do you demonstrate value to a leadership team that is rightly focused on results?

What I found most compelling about Jason’s perspective is its relevance beyond fintech. The pressures he describes, from rising scrutiny on budgets to the need for clearer accountability, are familiar to every CMO.

In this episode, we cover:

• How to rethink measurement to reflect real commercial impact

• Why brand and performance are strongest when planned together

• How to build credibility with finance and the wider business

If you are looking to sharpen how you measure and communicate marketing’s value, this is well worth a listen.

Listen now now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube.

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How exposed are we?

According to the IEA’s March 2026 Oil Market Report between 80 and 90 percent of oil and LNG passing through the Strait of Hormuz is bound for Asian markets, which will completely upend GDP forecasts, inflation trajectories and interest rate environments across our region and our governments are responding accordingly:

• The Philippines has declared a national energy emergency.

• South Korea has activated an emergency task force.

• Singapore has issued electricity conservation directives.

• Australia is managing active fuel shortages affecting supply chains and retail economics.

These policy responses create the operating environment for your business right now and they are changing consumer behaviour faster than most media plans can adapt.

Your plan wasn’t built to simulate this level of change

I want to sit with that point for a moment, because I think it’s the one most marketers are avoiding.

Think about what government policy responses actually do to the foundations of a media plan. The Philippines’ shift toward a four-day government working week changes audience availability, commuting patterns and the windows in which your brand reaches people. Singapore’s focus on energy conservation and diversification is prompting households to rethink their daily routines and consumption patterns. Australia’s fuel shortage is changing physical retail foot traffic in ways that make last quarter’s OOH performance data a questionable input for the next one.

The challenge that your current plan was likely built to optimise against a single, expected future - not to adapt as that future shifts in real time. As Paul Sinkinson, MD Asia & Australia Analytic Partners puts it,

“A media plan written three months ago was based on assumptions about cost, demand and behaviour that have now fundamentally moved. Continuing to execute against assumes a level of stability that simply isn’t there.”

I am not trying to alarm anyone, only acknowledge that macro conditions now move faster than planning cycles. Sinkinson adds, “The marketers who come out ahead won’t be the ones with the most optimised plans, but the ones who can simulate, stress-test and adapt to multiple scenarios as conditions evolve - and have the answers ready when budget questions get harder.”

From fuel crisis to brand stress test

Let me elevate this beyond logistics for a moment, because I think the logistics layer is where most of the conversation is stuck.

Of course platforms like Uber, Grab and Gojek face obvious unit-economics pressure when fuel costs spike. And of course food delivery margins compress; tourism operators face a radically different cost structure, and these are real and urgent problems. But the deeper risk is the cascade that runs from energy costs into inflation, from inflation into pricing decisions, and from pricing decisions into brand loyalty.

The brands that invested in genuine pricing power before this moment i.e. brands that built enough trust and differentiation that consumers will follow them through a price increase, are in a fundamentally different position from brands that competed primarily on being the cheapest option. An energy shock doesn’t create that gap but it does make it more visible.

This is a brand equity stress test happening in real life and you need the data to know where you stand before the test results come in.

The five questions to consider right now

I’ve spent the past several weeks in conversations with CMOs across the region and here are the five questions that keep surfacing plus the reason they’re hard to answer without the right analytical foundation.

1. If my costs go up, how much can I raise price without killing demand?

Price elasticity is not an industry average, it’s category-specific, brand-specific, and market-specific. What you do with your price in isolation barely matters. What does matter though is what happens to your price relative to every other price in the category. Price anchoring is real, but it is relative, not absolute, and inflation exposes the myth that consumers won’t adapt.

The CMO’s pricing conversation shouldn’t start with “how much can we raise price?”, it should start with “where are we positioned in the category right now, as everyone faces the same cost pressures?”.

2. If I can’t supply product, should I still be advertising and in what ratio?

The instinct to pause spend when supply is constrained is understandable but it’s also frequently wrong. Going dark has real brand equity costs that tend to show up six to twelve months later, when you’ve lost mental availability at exactly the moment supply normalises. The better question is: what’s the right channel mix and brand-versus-performance weighting for this moment?

3. Media costs are rising. Where do I cut without breaking the system when budget is flat?

This is the question where instinct is most dangerous. The cuts that feel logical such as reducing brand-building spend in favour of performance marketing or pulling back on upper-funnel investment, are frequently the ones that cost the most in long-term revenue. Every channel has a point at which the next dollar returns less than the one before it. The channels where you’ve already passed that threshold are where cuts hurt least but those are rarely the ones that feel expendable.

The channels that feel easiest to cut such as brand, upper-funnel and long-form video, are frequently still operating below their diminishing returns threshold, meaning every dollar pulled is a dollar that was still generating meaningful return. Without diminishing returns analysis by channel, budget cuts under pressure become a guessing game where the most defensible-sounding answers are usually the most expensive ones.

4. What does a local policy response actually do to my media plan?

Consider what happens to OOH inventory on public transport networks when a government makes transit free — ridership surges. The audiences that were already committed to those placements are now larger and more diverse than when the plan was written. If you bought that inventory three months ago, you’re getting more than you paid for but if you’re buying now, the market has caught up. Rates reflect the new reality, and the question shifts: is this inventory worth the new price, relative to everything else in your mix?

This is what local policy responses do to a media plan; they change the underlying value equation of inventory you already hold, and they change the relative priority of what you should be buying next. A static plan built on pre-crisis ridership data cannot answer either question. It can only execute against assumptions that no longer hold.

5. Finance wants cuts, what is the commercial case for holding spend?

This is a CFO conversation disguised as a media conversation. The data on what sustained spend cuts do to long-term revenue are among the most robust and consistent findings in commercial analytics. Framing it correctly — as a revenue protection argument, not a marketing advocacy argument — is the difference between being heard and being overruled.

💬 I’d genuinely like to know: which of these five questions is the most urgent for you right now? Drop it in the comments and I’ll engage with every response.

COVID taught something we often forget

I want to be careful here, because I’m tired of lazy COVID comparisons as much as anyone. This is not COVID. The dynamics are different, the policy levers are different, and the consumer psychology is different in important ways.

But here’s what is consistent, and what our work at Analytic Partners — particularly through the ROI Genome, which aggregates commercial analytics data across thousands of campaigns globally — validates with directional confidence: the human behaviour patterns around spending, brand trust and price sensitivity under sustained economic pressure are remarkably consistent across disruption events.

During COVID, we observed patterns that are directly relevant to now:

• Brands that held spend through disruption recovered revenue faster when conditions normalised and that finding held across categories and markets.

• TV and online video ROI increased significantly when WFH behaviours took hold and of course OOH and radio dropped. Channel mix optimisation in real time, as opposed to the next planning cycle, was what separated the brands that came out ahead.

• Over-indexing on performance marketing during a period of constrained demand cost more and delivered less growth than maintaining balanced investment. The efficiency metrics looked better but the commercial outcomes were worse.

The Singapore electricity conservation directives and the Philippine four-day week are not COVID but the channel dynamics they create rhyme with patterns we’ve validated before, which at least gives us a place to start.

The difference between commentary and decisioning

What this moment requires isn’t commentary, it’s decisioning. The ability to take an environment of genuine uncertainty and model it into commercial strategy. To answer questions like the five above not with instinct or convention, but with data that is current, market-specific and built on the right analytical foundations.

Marketing Mix Modelling in this environment supports scenario planning, price decisioning and channel optimisation. Frankly speaking it’s a budget protection argument you can take to the CFO and it’s the reason why marketers who have already done this thinking will come out ahead.

The question I’ll leave you with

APAC CMOs are, understandably, tired of global content that treats Asia and Australia as an afterthought, a footnote to a US-centric story about energy and inflation. This crisis lands on our desk in a way it doesn’t land on our counterparts in London or New York and it requires a response built in our markets by our brands for our consumers.

The five questions above are a starting point. The real work is building the analytical capability to answer them, quickly. To help I will shortly publish a follow-up piece that moves from diagnostic to playbook i.e. what the data-informed response actually looks like, by market and by category. If this piece resonated, follow along because the next one will get hands on.

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Finally, which of those five questions is the most urgent on your desk right now?

Tell me in the comments. I mean that genuinely because the conversation in the thread below will be as valuable as anything I can write.

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Built on decades of evidence and rigour, it is now evolving to meet the demands of a more volatile, fast-moving environment. As expectations shift from explanation to action, MMM is becoming a more active part of how organisations plan, adapt and grow.

In this episode, Paul Sinkinson, Managing Director Asia & Australia at Analytic Partners, returns to The CMO Office Podcast to explore what has changed over the past year, and why it matters now more than ever.

The conversation reflects a broader shift in how leading organisations are approaching measurement, moving beyond static views of performance towards something more continuous, commercial and decision-focused.

🎧Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube🎧

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In this episode, we cover:

• Why MMM is becoming more central to modern marketing

  As fragmentation increases and signal loss continues, model-based approaches are providing a more stable, holistic view of performance across channels and over time.

• The shift from explanation to action

  The role of MMM is expanding beyond understanding past performance to enabling faster, more confident decisions through ongoing modelling and scenario planning.

• Why the old debates are fading in relevance

  Brand and performance, online and offline, attribution and MMM. These distinctions matter less in practice than how effectively they work together to drive growth.

• How volatility is reshaping marketing decision-making

  External factors such as inflation, pricing and supply constraints are playing a greater role, requiring marketers to adopt a broader, more commercial perspective.

• What modern MMM looks like in practice

  Leading organisations are moving towards more dynamic models that update regularly, incorporate a wider set of variables and support in-flight optimisation.

• The growing importance of alignment with finance

  A shared understanding of growth drivers is strengthening collaboration between marketing and the CFO, helping to connect marketing activity more directly to business outcomes.

• Where AI is adding value

  AI is improving speed and accessibility, but effective modelling continues to depend on strong data foundations, thoughtful design and expert interpretation.

• Why a broader view of growth is essential

  Marketing remains a critical driver of performance, but it operates within a wider system of demand drivers that must be understood to make better decisions .

Why it matters

The role of MMM is expanding.

It is becoming embedded in how organisations make decisions, not just how they evaluate them. For CMOs navigating increasing scrutiny and complexity, this evolution offers something valuable: a clearer line of sight between marketing decisions and business outcomes, grounded in evidence rather than assumption.

🎧Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube🎧

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Last night we were proud to take home Silver for Best B2B Content Marketing Strategy for ‘The CMO Office’ at Marketing Interactive’s Content 360 Awards, in no small part thanks to your support so thank you and please keep on subscribing, reading and sharing, Nx🙏

Now, where was I?

Oh yes, when I spoke at the Digital Marketing Summit in Seoul recently, I wanted to focus on a gap that most marketers recognise but rarely address directly; the world moves quickly but our plans do not…

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Many organisations are still working to annual plans set months ago, sometimes close to a year in advance. Those plans were built on a set of assumptions about demand, pricing, supply, competition and consumer behaviour that may no longer hold true.

At the same time, the dashboards used to track performance tend to capture only part of the picture. Campaign metrics update constantly, but they rarely reflect the broader forces shaping results. For instance, a campaign may underperform not because the media plan is wrong, but because distribution has shifted. Or results may appear strong when demand has been artificially inflated by external factors.

The consequence is a growing disconnect between what marketers see and what is actually happening in our complex world. So, what can we do?

1. Don’t blindly believe your dashboard

Modern marketing dashboards are powerful. They provide real-time visibility into campaign performance across channels but they are not designed to capture everything that drives results. They are only the tip of the iceberg.

Most dashboards focus on media metrics: impressions, clicks, conversions, ROI. These are important, but they sit within a much wider system. Marketing outcomes are shaped by a combination of factors such as pricing decisions, distribution availability, competitive activity, macroeconomic conditions and consumer sentiment, which all play a role.

Our proprietary ROI Genome analysis shows that marketing contributes between 10 percent and 50 percent of business performance, with the majority influenced by factors beyond marketing itself. When these elements are not included in measurement, performance can be misinterpreted. A campaign may appear underwhelming when the real issue is product availability. Strong results may be attributed to media when they are driven by external demand shifts.

Without a broader view, decisions are made on incomplete - even misleading - information.

2. Widen your field of vision

Speaking of taking a broader view, one of the key points I shared in Seoul is that marketers need to widen their field of vision.

Understanding performance requires looking beyond individual channels and beyond marketing itself. It requires a view of the full commercial system. This includes how channels interact with each other. It includes how brand and performance activity work together. It includes how external factors influence demand.

Integrated strategies consistently outperform siloed approaches. Combining online and offline channels delivers significantly stronger results, with up to 50 percent greater efficiency compared to single-channel strategies .

These effects are not visible when channels are measured in isolation. They only emerge when the full system is considered.

3. You can’t predict the future. But you can prepare for it.

Now you can see more of the picture, the question becomes: what do you do with it?

Most organisations are still set up to look backwards. Campaigns are analysed after they finish. Insights arrive once the moment to act has passed. In a stable environment, that delay is manageable. In a volatile one, it becomes a risk.

Because the reality is, you cannot forecast the future with certainty. But you can prepare for it. Reporting tells you what happened and simulation tells you what could happen.

That means building scenarios in advance. Understanding how your business responds to different conditions. Knowing which levers to pull, what to pull back on, how to adjust pricing, and how to rebalance your mix across brand and performance when conditions change.

Because when those moments come, and they will, the organisations that win are not the ones scrambling for answers. They are the ones who have already pressure-tested the decisions. This is where marketing moves from reporting the past to shaping what happens next.

4. Use Marketing Mix Modelling

And this is precisely the context in which marketing mix modelling becomes most valuable.

At its core, marketing mix modelling provides a structured way to understand how different factors contribute to performance. At Analytic Partners, we extend this into Commercial Mix Modelling, which goes beyond marketing to include pricing, distribution, operational factors and macroeconomic conditions. It connects marketing activity with broader business drivers and external conditions, which makes it uniquely suited to today’s environment.

Rather than relying on partial metrics, Commercial Mix Modelling provides a holistic view of performance, enables forward-looking scenario planning and supports continuous recalibration.

It is no longer just a retrospective tool used to validate past decisions. It is becoming a system for ongoing decision-making, not by measuring in real time, but by pre-planning scenarios so teams know how to respond when conditions change.

Companies that adopt this kind of approach move faster and make more confident decisions. Organisations that embed data-driven decisioning into their operating model have been shown to achieve significantly stronger growth outcomes, including up to five times the growth of those that do not.

5. Move from plans to possibilities

The implications for marketers are clear:

• Annual plans still have a role, but they cannot remain static. They need to evolve as conditions change.

• Measurement needs to extend beyond campaign metrics to include the full set of factors influencing performance.

• Decision-making needs to shift from retrospective reporting to continuous, real-time optimisation.

• Most importantly, marketers need to recognise that the environment they operate in is not fixed. It is dynamic, interconnected and often unpredictable.

The path forward

The gap between the pace of the market and the pace of marketing decision-making is becoming more visible. Closing that gap requires more than better dashboards. It requires a different approach to measurement. One that captures the full system. One that looks forward as well as back. One that enables faster, more informed decisions because in a world that does not stand still, marketing cannot afford to either.

If you would like to hear the full keynote, you can listen to my session from the Digital Marketing Summit on The CMO Office Podcast, available now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube.

For many brands in China, it has delivered exactly what they needed at the right moment: rapid, measurable growth. And yet, for a growing number of those same brands, something has begun to change. Growth slows, efficiency declines, investment continues to rise, but the incremental return begins to flatten. Not suddenly or dramatically, but persistently enough to raise the question:

What if the platform that accelerated your growth is also limiting it?

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The mechanics of early success

Douyin’s strength lies in its ability to generate demand rather than simply capture it. Unlike traditional marketplaces such as T-mall or JD, where consumers arrive with a degree of intent, Douyin operates upstream. It creates interest through content, often before the consumer has actively entered the category. This makes it particularly effective for customer acquisition.

The data reflects this clearly. Douyin now accounts for approximately 18% of China’s total e-commerce market, and brands entering the platform typically experience a strong uplift in sales during the first one to three years.

This early phase can feel transformative as new audiences are reached, sales grow quickly and performance media appears highly efficient. From a planning perspective, it is easy to extrapolate this trajectory forward…which is exactly where the risk creeps in.

The plateau effect

Over time, the dynamics on Douyin shift. As brands increase spend, particularly in performance media, they move beyond the point of optimal investment. Additional budget continues to drive sales but at a diminishing rate, which means efficiency declines, even as absolute spend rises.

According to our China client data, around 80% of brands’ investment in Douyin performance media has already passed the optimal spend level . At the same time, the spend-to-sales ratio on Douyin performance media is typically between 1.0x and 3.5x higher than on T-mall .

These are not marginal differences, they point to a structural shift in efficiency. The pattern is consistent; initial growth followed by a gradual plateau, often beginning around year three. And yet, despite this, investment rarely declines.

The “new battlefield” effect

One of the more revealing dynamics is behavioural rather than technical. Many brands recognise that they are overspending on Douyin performance media. The data is often visible internally and the diminishing returns are understood but reducing investment feels risky. Why? Because Douyin is perceived as the new competitive battleground. Visibility within the platform is tied directly to spend. In at least one case I personally know of, when a brand switched off all Douyin media, sales on the platform dropped to zero!

This is the defining characteristic of a pay-to-play environment. It creates a feedback loop where continued investment is required to maintain performance, even as efficiency declines.

A full-funnel platform, misused

What makes this dynamic more complex is that Douyin is not simply a performance channel. It is one of the few platforms that genuinely operates across the full funnel. It can build awareness, shape consideration and drive conversion within the same ecosystem.

It also delivers unusually strong halo effects. Investment on Douyin, both in awareness and performance, has been shown to drive sales on T-mall, JD and even offline channels. This is not typical of most e-commerce platforms, which tend to capture demand rather than create it. The issue, therefore, is not the platform itself. It is how it is being used.

Many brands approach Douyin primarily as a performance channel, optimising for immediate conversion. In doing so, they underinvest in the very elements that sustain long-term efficiency: brand building, creative consistency and broader demand generation. The result is predictable; performance peaks early, then becomes increasingly expensive to maintain.

The ROI of Douyin performance media is, on average, 25% higher when awareness investment is at least half of performance spend .

Rebalancing the investment mix

The data points towards a different approach. When brands allocate a more balanced mix between awareness and performance within Douyin, outcomes improve materially. Our own data shows that the ROI of Douyin performance media is, on average, 25% higher when awareness investment is at least half of performance spend.

This reflects a broader principle seen across markets: brand investment enhances the effectiveness of performance activity. In Douyin’s case, this effect is amplified by the platform’s content-driven nature. Strong creative and consistent brand presence improve engagement, increase conversion efficiency, and extend impact beyond the platform itself.

From optimisation to calibration

For marketers, the implication is clear; Douyin should not be treated as a channel to maximise, but as an environment to calibrate. This requires moving beyond linear optimisation, where spend is increased as long as returns appear positive, towards a more deliberate approach based on scenario planning.

• What happens to total business performance if Douyin performance spend is reduced by 15% and reallocated to brand-building activity?

• How does the balance between Douyin, T-mall and offline channels affect overall growth?

• At what point does additional Douyin investment begin to cannibalise returns elsewhere?

These questions are the essence of of incrementality and cannot be answered through platform metrics alone. They require a holistic view of performance, incorporating cross-channel effects, diminishing returns and long-term brand impact.

A more measured approach to growth

The implication is not that brands should reduce their presence on Douyin, but that they should treat it with greater precision. This means understanding where investment is genuinely incremental, where it is sustaining existing demand, and how activity on the platform is influencing performance across the wider ecosystem.

The commercial risk is rarely that Douyin ceases to deliver, but that it continues to deliver at a lower level of efficiency while consuming a disproportionate share of budget that could be working harder elsewhere.

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If Douyin is now central to your growth strategy, let us help answer the question whether your investment is being optimised for scale, or calibrated for efficiency.

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In the Philippines, a state of national energy emergency has been declared, alongside fuel restrictions and a four-day working week in parts of government. Sri Lanka has reintroduced QR-based fuel rationing. Japan has begun releasing national oil stockpiles. South Korea has mobilised a cross-government economic response. China has stepped in to stabilise domestic fuel prices. Australia is actively preparing for supply disruption through coordinated national planning.

These are not edge cases, they are signals. And for marketers, they expose a structural weakness in how organisations plan and take action in uncertain conditions.

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The illusion of a stable plan

Most marketing plans are built as if the future will resemble the recent past, with minor adjustments. Assumptions are made about demand, pricing, media performance and competitive behaviour. These assumptions are reasonable at the point of planning but they are inherently fragile.

They rely on conditions that no longer hold. When energy costs rise sharply, distribution becomes more expensive. When inflation increases, pricing decisions change and consumer purchasing power shifts. When governments intervene, entire categories can behave differently overnight. But the plan? That rarely adapts so just become less accurate over time.

Most organisations continue to measure performance against that original plan. Variance is treated as underperformance. Budgets are adjusted reactively. Marketing is asked to explain outcomes that were shaped by forces far beyond its control. This is not a measurement issue, it is a planning issue built on the assumption that outcomes can be predicted with precision.

What marketers can and cannot influence

The first step towards more resilient marketing is clarity. Marketing controls creative, media investment, targeting and timing. It can influence demand and it can shape preference but it does not control fuel prices, supply chain disruption, interest rates or government policy.

Analytic Partners’ ROI Genome demonstrate that marketing contributes between 10% and 50% of business performance depending on the context, with the majority of growth driven by non-marketing factors such as macroeconomic conditions, availability and broader consumer trends .

That reality has always existed. What has changed is the scale and speed at which those external factors are moving, meaning a single marketing plan is no longer enough.

From prediction to scenario planning

This is where modelling takes on a different role. Historically, modelling has been used to explain past performance i.e. which channels worked, what drove ROI and how campaigns performed. That remains useful but is no longer sufficient.

In volatile conditions, the real value of modelling lies in its ability to simulate multiple scenarios. Not to predict a single outcome, but to quantify a range of possible outcomes and the trade-offs between them so...

• What happens if fuel prices rise another 15% and distribution costs follow?

• What happens if consumer demand softens in metropolitan areas but holds in regional markets?

• What happens if a competitor responds to cost pressure by reducing price or increasing promotional intensity?

It would be great to imagine these as theoretical questions but they’re not, they’re active dynamics across APAC markets right now.

The purpose of modelling is to bring structure to that uncertainty and allow marketers to explore the consequences of different conditions before they fully materialise so that they can plan responses accordingly. You cannot forecast what will happen in this environment, but you can prepare for what could happen.

How to build a dynamic planning capability

This, as ever, requires a shift in thinking and process.

1. First, planning needs to move beyond a single view of the future. The annual plan cannot remain static while the environment changes around it, but nor should it require rebuilding every time conditions shift. Instead, organisations need a stable modelling foundation that allows different scenarios to be explored as conditions evolve, applying consistent logic to new situations rather than reworking the model itself. The focus shifts from trying to get the plan right, to understanding how the business will respond under different conditions; fuel costs, pricing pressure, demand shifts or supply constraints. This is not about constant change, but about being prepared; using scenario planning both in periods of volatility and as a way to de-risk decisions before they are made.

2. Second, those external forces need to be built into decision-making, not just acknowledged. Too often, factors such as inflation, competitor activity or supply constraints are recognised in discussion but remain disconnected from how plans are actually evaluated. In the current environment, that gap becomes a risk. These variables are not peripheral, they shape performance. A robust model brings them into the core of scenario planning, allowing organisations to understand not just what is happening, but how those forces interact with marketing and commercial decisions.

3. Third, scenario planning needs to move from theory into action. It is not enough to recognise uncertainty or model external forces; organisations need to define how they would respond under different conditions. Rather than asking what will happen, the focus shifts to what could happen, and what decisions follow. This creates a set of pre-considered responses that can be activated quickly as conditions evolve, reducing reaction time and allowing marketing to operate with greater control in uncertain environments.

Our approach is to begin with early briefing, followed by modelling multiple scenarios before plans are finalised. Those scenarios are compared, refined, and then revisited as conditions evolve. This is not done in isolation, but informed by a broad base of cross-market evidence, built over time and tested through periods of disruption. During COVID, for example, scenario modelling was informed by patterns emerging across different markets, allowing responses to be shaped by what was already unfolding elsewhere, not just what had already happened locally.

This is a fundamentally different discipline from traditional forecasting. It accepts that precision is not possible and instead prioritises preparedness, using data, experience and structured modelling to understand how different conditions are likely to play out, and how the business should respond.

Connecting marketing to the wider business

There is an additional implication; as scenario planning become more dynamic, the boundary between marketing and the rest of the business becomes less defined. Pricing decisions affect demand. Distribution constraints affect availability. Macroeconomic conditions affect both. Marketing interacts with all of these factors, but cannot be evaluated in isolation from them. This is why a commercial analytics lens is increasingly important.

Rather than focusing solely on marketing inputs and outputs, commercial analytics integrates marketing with financial, operational and external data. It recognises that performance is the result of interaction between multiple drivers. This allows for more meaningful questions to be asked; not simply which channel delivered the highest return, but how marketing is amplifying or offsetting broader market forces. Not just what happened, but what is likely to happen under different conditions.

This is where the value of partnership becomes critical. Scenario planning is only as strong as the data, the model, and the expertise behind it. With a consistent modelling approach grounded in long-term, cross-category evidence, organisations are able to apply proven intelligence to new scenarios as they arise, rather than rebuild their understanding each time conditions change. The result is not a prediction of what will happen, but a clearer view of how the business is likely to respond under different conditions, and which levers to pull as those conditions emerge.

Confidence in uncertain conditions

For CMOs, this shift has a practical benefit. It changes the nature of conversations with leadership.

In a static planning model, deviations from the marketing plan are often difficult to explain. In a dynamic model, those deviations are anticipated, quantified and contextualised, which builds credibility. It demonstrates that marketing understands the commercial environment, not just its own activity within it. And it provides a clearer link between marketing decisions and business outcomes, even when those outcomes are influenced by external factors. In a period of heightened scrutiny on budgets and performance, that clarity matters.

A different approach to the future

For good or ill, volatility is no longer an exception. It is becoming a defining feature of the operating environment. Geopolitical instability, economic pressure and shifting consumer behaviour are not temporary disruptions. They are ongoing conditions that require a different approach to planning.

For marketers, this means letting go of the idea that the future can be forecast once and then executed against. The future cannot be predicted with confidence in this environment, but it can be actively managed through scenario planning.

The real risk is not that predictions might be wrong, but that they remain unchanged after everything else has moved.

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This was not a quick poll. Each interview ran for 45 minutes, supported by a detailed survey exploring how investment decisions are actually made in 2026.

The answers were deeply revealing because, despite all the tools, dashboards and data available today, the way most organisations make budget decisions still isn’t as advanced as we might like to think.

We’ve broken this down into the five forces shaping how marketing investment decisions are really being made right now and what to do about them.

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Insight #1: Data remains a limiter

For most large advertisers, data is still the biggest barrier to making confident decisions. Fragmentation, privacy constraints and difficulty integrating external data sources continue to slow teams down.

The issue, it seems, is no longer access to data. It is the ability to connect, interpret and apply it in a way that drives action. The practical implication for CMOs is clear, they don’t need more data, rather, usable, connected, decision-ready data.

Our take? Organisations that adopt privacy-safe, model-based methods can overcome many obstacles that have stalled progress. Approaches that integrate data across time and geography, rather than people and devices, are inherently more resilient to fragmentation and privacy constraints. Together, these methods create a more stable, durable, and holistic foundation for confident decisioning.

Insight #2: External factors are the critical gap

It is not just about marketing performance data, the bigger issue is what sits outside of it. External factors such as pricing, distribution, competitive activity and macroeconomic conditions are still poorly integrated into decision-making. That matters because marketing does not operate in isolation (and it never has), yet most measurement systems still treat it as if it does.

Broader ROI Genome analysis shows that marketing typically drives only 10% to 50% of business outcomes directly, with the rest influenced by factors beyond marketing. If your measurement system only captures marketing activity, you are only seeing, and optimising, part of the picture.

Analytics gain a great deal more credibility when they reflect the environment in which decisions are made. Models that incorporate external context allow leaders to explore what-if scenarios with shifts to that context and forecast new expected outcomes

Insight #3: Marketing budget decisions are the least data-driven

First the good news: very few leaders rely purely on gut these days - only about 3%. Most blend data with experience, and the remainder depend on the data (shown below). However, marketing leaders are far less likely to take a highly data-driven approach (22%) compared to their Finance (45%) and Analytics (36%) counterparts. This gap shows that even with widespread analytic tools, many teams still default to judgment over data when setting budgets.

There is plenty of evidence that organisations whose decisions are rooted in robust measurement consistently outperform their industry peers so why is marketing lagging? We believe marketing leaders have the greatest opportunity to raise their own decisions rigour by lifting budget allocation from the least data-driven strategic area to one that performs at least on par with other departments.

Insight 4: Marketing Mix Modeling is the most-cited source of truth

I’ll hand over to one of our participants to illustrate this point:

Couldn’t have said it better myself!

Insight 5: Marketing Mix Modeling must match the speed and volatility of your business.

Among organisations using MMM, or it’s big brother Commercial Analytics, 82% receive new or updated results at least quarterly. This aligns with the reality that major advertisers revisit budgets and reallocate spend multiple times per year as conditions change.

When measurement lags behind the business, it stops being a decision tool and becomes a historical record. MMM is a powerful test-and-learn engine that enables opportunities identified in one quarter to be implemented in the next and measured for impact. That repeatable reinforcement cycle builds executive confidence in the outputs and, over time, accelerates the shift from “balanced” decisions to the data-first decisions that drive predictable growth.

What does this mean for CMOs?

Taken together, these findings point to a shift in how marketing needs to operate, using reporting as a live decisioning tool rather than an historical artifact. And it’s not about who has the most data but who can:

• Integrate marketing with the wider business system

• Make confident decisions despite imperfect data

• Balance short-term performance with long-term growth

• Move at speed without losing rigour

• Align Marketing, Finance and Analytics around a shared view of how growth is created.

Because that alignment is what will turn insights into action. Want to know more? This article only scratches the surface of what 455 senior marketers, finance leaders and analysts shared with us. If you want to understand how leading organisations are evolving their approach to marketing investment and what it means for your own decision-making, the full report is well worth your time.

👉 Download the full report: Five Forces Shaping Marketing Budget Decisions in 2026

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The instinctive response is predictable. Cut “non-essential” spend. Push harder into performance. Optimise the mix. But here’s the thing: when budgets shrink, the wrong cuts quietly damage the very growth you’re trying to protect. The question isn’t how to survive shrinking budgets so much as how to reallocate them intelligently.

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The First Mistake: Chasing Efficiency at the Expense of Effectiveness

When money tightens, performance marketing looks safe. It converts. It reports weekly. It feels accountable. Yet ROI Genome® evidence consistently shows that brands leaning too heavily into short-term activation suffer a “performance penalty” over time. Revenue returns can decline by 20 to 40 percent when investment skews too far away from brand building. Why? Because performance channels harvest existing demand. They do not create it.

In flat or volatile markets, you can only squeeze so much from the same in-market audience before costs rise and returns plateau. Shrinking budgets demand sharper allocation, not narrower thinking.

The Multiplier Effect: Why Brand Works Harder Under Pressure

One of the most persistent myths in constrained environments is that brand is a luxury because the data says otherwise. Campaigns that balance brand and performance consistently deliver stronger total revenue returns than performance-only approaches. Strong brands convert more efficiently. They reduce price sensitivity and amplify media effectiveness

In practical terms, allocating at least 30 percent of media spend to equity-building activity provides the foundation for sustainable performance. Below that threshold, the multiplier weakens, which is exactly what we’re seeing play out across Australian FMCG brands right now.

Several have shifted to consistently back their Masterbrand on TV and Out-of-Home (OOH), while allowing individual product campaigns and launches to live primarily online. The logic is simple: Masterbrand media drives efficient reach, and that reach creates a halo effect across every smaller digital campaign.

One of our FMCG clients is a perfect example. After shifting to an always-on Masterbrand strategy offline, their product-level digital ROI did not dip, even without product-specific offline support. The Masterbrand campaign was already building demand for the whole portfolio.

What the Data Says About Channel Mix

ROI Genome® reinforces this structurally. The most efficient combination for many FMCG brands is a Masterbrand campaign across TV and OOH supporting digital product-level activity online. TV and OOH build mental availability at scale. Digital converts that demand.

However, brands operating with budgets in the AUD $1–2 million range often assume TV is essential to achieve this balance. That isn’t always the case.

Our data shows that OOH combined with digital can outperform TV + digital at certain budget levels, particularly when it allows brands to stay in market longer. OOH provides sustained reach at lower cost and strengthens digital performance through cross-channel reinforcement.

Continuity Compounds ROI

Another silent ROI killer in shrinking budget cycles is blank space. Our models consistently recommend leaving no more than 12 weeks between campaign bursts. Beyond that, cumulative impact erodes and you effectively have to “rebuild” brand momentum each time you return to market.

In practice, continuity doesn’t have to rely on a single channel. A powerful approach we increasingly see is OOH combined with video platforms such as YouTube, BVOD and SVOD. OOH maintains consistent physical presence and reach, while online video sustains emotional storytelling and reinforces brand memory. Together, they allow brands to remain visible between major campaign bursts without the cost of continuous TV.

When TV Isn’t Viable, OOH Can Carry the Load

Where budgets don’t stretch to TV, OOH can do more heavy lifting than many assume. With sufficient investment, OOH can deliver up to 80 percent of the ROI that would be achieved if TV were included in the mix. It drives efficient offline reach and reinforces digital channels to sustain performance.

Channel Synergy Matters More Than Ever

When budgets shrink, many marketers instinctively concentrate spend into one or two channels, typically search or social. It feels efficient but it often limits growth. What the data shows is that campaigns operating across multiple complementary channels consistently outperform those concentrated in just one or two. Each additional channel expands reach and reinforces brand memory, which improves the effectiveness of the whole system.

ROI by Number of Channels – Minimum 3 Recommended

The key is not spreading tiny budgets everywhere. It is layering channels strategically at meaningful levels of investment so they reinforce each other. For example, pairing OOH with digital video and online performance channels can deliver both reach and conversion, even when TV isn’t viable.

The Real Opportunity

Budget pressure is uncomfortable but it is also clarifying. It forces sharper prioritisation and challenges lazy allocation. It rewards leaders who can translate marketing decisions into commercial outcomes because shrinking budgets don’t necessarily mean shrinking ambition - they just mean better decisions.

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If budget pressure is intensifying in your organisation, the most important shift you can make is aligning marketing decisions with finance language. Our downloadable guide, “How to Get Your CFO to Say Yes”, outlines the commercial frameworks, scenario planning approaches and ROI arguments that resonate with finance leaders.

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Analytic Partners’ ROI Genome® shows that marketing typically explains 5–25% of business outcomes, depending on category and conditions. The rest comes from pricing, distribution, timing, operations, competitive dynamics and macro forces. In other words, over half of growth lives beyond the media plan.

This is not an argument to invest less in marketing. It is an argument to measure and manage growth differently.

From reporting performance to engineering growth

The strongest organisations are shifting away from viewing measurement as a reporting function and towards using it as a decisioning system.

The ROI Genome® Unlock Growth Insights reports frames this shift in three stages: Establish, Evolve and Operationalise.

Together, they describe how CMOs can move from explaining yesterday’s results to shaping tomorrow’s growth. Let’s go!

Establish: Turn data into expertise, not dashboards

The first trap many organisations fall into is mistaking data volume for insight.

Brands are capturing more data than ever, yet leaders often feel less confident making decisions. The reason is simple. Data is rarely connected back to the business questions that matter most.

ROI Genome® shows that high-performing organisations start by anchoring measurement to commercial goals, not channels or metrics. They focus on the questions that move the business, then assemble only the data needed to answer them. This also requires a mindset shift from measurement as report card, to measurement as planning tool.

More than 60% of brands find that their highest-performing channel today will not be their top performer in the next period. Organisations that use analytics for forward-looking scenario planning unlock $50–100 million in incremental growth without increasing spend.

Just as importantly, the most effective CMOs bring finance into this process early. When CFOs are actively involved, organisations identify significantly more growth opportunities. When they are not, 20–80% of potential upside is lost.

Growth does not happen in silos, measurement shouldn’t either.

Evolve: Balance short-term returns with long-term value

If there is one insight that consistently challenges short-term thinking, it is this: marketing impact is not immediate.

ROI Genome® analysis shows that two-thirds of short-term impact occurs after the week of execution, and that 10–50% of media impact is realised in the long term, well beyond typical attribution windows.

This matters because many optimisation decisions are still being made using last-click or short-term ROAS metrics. These approaches systematically over-credit highly clickable channels and under-value brand-building activity. In fact, last-click attribution can overstate the role of some channels by 2–10x, leading to material misallocation of budget. Brand investment is where this distortion becomes most damaging.

ROI Genome® shows that brands with the highest media ROI consistently allocate at least 30% of their budget to brand equity-building activity. When organisations move from a performance-only strategy to a balanced brand and performance approach, they see a median 90% increase in revenue ROI. Move back the other way, and returns fall by around 40%. Not to sound like a stuck record but, brand is not a soft metric it is a multiplier.

The same pattern appears in creative quality and timing. Strong creative outperforms weak creative by 2.5x, and brands that align spend with periods of natural demand achieve 30% higher ROI.

Operationalise: Make insight usable, not theoretical

Insight only creates value when it changes behaviour.

The final step is embedding analytics into everyday decision-making, so that insight travels beyond the marketing team and into the organisation.

This is where many programmes stall. ROI Genome® shows that businesses with strong organisational adoption of analytics grow five times faster than those where insight remains trapped in reports and presentations .

The most effective organisations do three things consistently.

1. First, they move beyond last-click thinking. For every dollar allocated based on siloed ROAS or attribution metrics, 35 cents of opportunity is lost. Holistic measurement surfaces the true drivers of growth and protects investment from false efficiencies .

2. Second, they use scenario planning as a core management discipline. Brands that adopt consistent scenario planning through Commercial Analytics see 50% ROI growth over five years, with top performers doubling ROI in as little as four to six years .

3. Third, they commit to the long game. ROI Genome® shows that brands that maintained or increased media investment during economic downturns achieved 17% incremental sales growth, alongside stronger ROI and brand health. Short-term wins matter, but sustained growth is built over time .

Growth is a leadership choice

The real lesson from ROI Genome® is not about channels, tactics or tools. It is about leadership.

Growth comes from making better decisions, faster, with a clearer understanding of how marketing, pricing, operations and external forces interact.

CMOs who embrace this broader commercial view stop defending budgets and start shaping strategy. They move from reporting performance to engineering growth. And in an increasingly complex, volatile market, that shift may be the most valuable one of all.

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1. Twenty Channels and Counting

Chinese brands typically run campaigns across more than twenty touchpoints, far more than marketers in other markets attempt. According to Analytic Partners data analyses, this fragmentation isn’t inefficiency; it’s the reality of how consumers move. From livestream discovery to e-commerce conversion, the buyer journey is anything but linear. Each platform plays a distinct role, as our VP and Asia Lead Jun Cao explains:

“Douyin offers full funnel functionality from awareness building and entertainment to conversion but it also creates a halo effect on other, more conversion-focused channels like Tmall and JD.com. Little Red Book fuels peer influence and product discovery. WeChat communities nurture loyalty and repeat purchase.”

2. Why Channel Synergy Matters

Analytic Partners’ ROI Genome® has long shown that marketing channels don’t operate in isolation. When combined, they can lift ROI by as much as 50 percent compared to single-channel strategies. The same holds true, perhaps even more so, in China.

Investing in one channel often boosts returns elsewhere. For example, campaigns that include Douyin not only perform strongly within the platform but also enhance sales on Tmall and JD. Video content drives search activity, encourages word-of-mouth and amplifies social mentions. In other words, the “halo effect” is real; when media channels complement one another, their combined impact far exceeds the sum of their parts.

3. Case in Point: The Douyin Effect

Analytic Partners’ modelling in China frequently shows that investment on Douyin amplifies performance on e-commerce platforms such as Tmall, with measurable lifts in both traffic and conversion. Our Shanghai-based modelling team also observes consistent spillover effects, where a meaningful share of sales attributed to Douyin exposure actually converts on other platforms. In these cases, between 10 and 40 percent of Douyin-driven media sales materialise elsewhere across the e-commerce ecosystem. While the exact uplift varies by brand, the halo effect between short video engagement and platform conversion is one of the strongest and most reliable dynamics we see in the market according to Jun:

“We frequently see this pattern in China. For example, brands that rely primarily on search and display often unlock significantly higher ROI when short-video exposure is added to the mix. In many cases, campaign effectiveness rises by 20 to 40 percent, with clear halo effects across search activity, word of mouth and direct-to-consumer traffic following bursts of Douyin activity.”

4. Beyond Paid: The Role of Owned and Earned

Chinese consumers don’t distinguish between paid, owned and earned touchpoints. A WeChat mini-program or a Little Red Book review can have as much influence as a paid ad. According to our ROI Genome® insights, TV and online video can double their impact once indirect effects, such as search uplift and word-of-mouth, are included.

For Chinese marketers, that interconnection is even tighter. A livestream sale doesn’t just move inventory; it creates content that fans repost, dissect and remix across social media. The echo continues long after the “Buy Now” button is clicked.

5. What This Means for Global Marketers

Marketers outside China often underestimate the pay-to-play dynamics of its digital ecosystem. Each platform demands investment to unlock reach and visibility, but those investments don’t live in silos. The real return comes from orchestration - aligning content, timing and targeting so that one channel amplifies another.

In practical terms:

• Map interactions, not channels. Understand how exposure in one platform influences behaviour in another.

• Balance brand and performance. ROI Genome® data shows that campaigns blending awareness and activation deliver up to 90% higher ROI than performance-only approaches.

• Measure synergies, not just clicks. Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) and unified measurement frameworks can quantify cross-platform effects and reveal the hidden multipliers traditional attribution misses.

6. The Future is Omnichannel AND Algorithmic

As e-commerce, social, and entertainment continue to blur, the boundaries between channels will disappear. Algorithms already optimise cross-platform exposure in real time, rewarding brands that deliver consistent creative and messaging. Those who treat each platform as a standalone buy will simply be outplayed by those who plan for synergy. Jun’s advice?

“In China, it’s not just about being everywhere, it’s about making every channel work together. The brands winning today aren’t spending more; they’re spending smarter, recognising that synergy is the secret ingredient in their ROI recipe.”

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The truth, however, is that most brands aren’t actually at that ceiling. Our data shows that 98.7% of brands in Australia and New Zealand still have headroom before reaching diminishing returns on video. The conversation about saturation is loud - particularly in finance rooms - but in practice, very few advertisers have genuinely maxed out their video investment.

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The problem is, marketing ROI curves don’t behave like a failing investment. They behave more like a gym program. Your first few weeks deliver obvious gains. Then progress slows. Not because the gym “stopped working”, but because you’ve moved from “new stimulus” to “maintenance and compounding”. If you quit the moment results plateau, you don’t preserve the gains - you gradually give them back.

That’s why Stu Carr’s recent Mi3 piece landed. His central point is that what looks like “efficiency” at low frequency is often just the benefit of earlier work still paying off. As he puts it: “A frequency of one can work. But it works best when it sits on top of prior effort.”

We agree with that logic. But there’s an even bigger commercial tripwire sitting underneath it and it shows up every time someone says: “We’re hitting diminishing returns, so we should cap spend.”

Because declining ROI does not automatically mean declining value. It can mean the channel is still the best option you’ve got and cutting it could reduce total campaign ROI. More importantly, it often reflects confusion between how much you should spend (your total budget) and how you should allocate that spend. These are not the same decision and mixing them up is where most mistakes happen.

Why this gets so confusing in streaming and digital video

In the linear TV era, frequency wasn’t something you neatly engineered. It was something that happened as a by-product of scale. You bought reach, and repetition arrived whether you liked it or not. Streaming and digital video changed the rules: you can cap frequency, throttle delivery, and flatten exposure. That feels “disciplined”… right up until you realise you might be flattening the very mechanism that built memory in the first place.

And memory, like fitness, is built through consistency.

In our norms across Australia and New Zealand, one of the cleanest patterns is this: going from under 10 weeks on air to 20–30+ weeks can increase ROI by up to 60%. That’s not a rounding error. That’s the difference between “we showed up” and “we stayed in the market long enough to become easy to remember.”

Burst campaigns are expensive because they keep restarting the job. Each time you go dark, you give up momentum and have to rebuild it. Continuity works differently. It reinforces what people already know rather than reintroducing yourself from scratch. Over time, that reinforcement compounds. You’re not just buying impressions but strengthening memory structures that make future advertising work harder for you.

The “frequency of 1” idea isn’t wrong, it’s just incomplete

Marketers love rules of thumb because rules feel safe. “Frequency of one” is one of those rules. As Paul Sinkinson, Managing Director Asia & Australia Analytic Partners explains, we never truly operated at a frequency of one on linear TV because we couldn’t cap it.

“The actual exposure levels were higher than the planning assumption and that’s part of why it worked.”

When we look at what “optimal” actually looks like in YouTube it’s not 1. Our modelling indicates 2.7 exposures per week is the ROI-maximising point for maintenance activity, and 3.8 exposures per week for launch activity.

Now here’s where it gets practical for a senior marketer: even those “optimal” points can be misleading if you apply them as a blunt instrument. Why? Because launches aren’t just about short-term ROI, they’re about building the structure that makes later efficiency possible. If you judge a launch like it’s a maintenance campaign, you’ll almost always under-invest early and then wonder why you can’t “optimise” your way to growth later.

Reach still matters but it has a sweet spot

The other thing digital video planning tends to do is underplay reach because it feels abstract compared to conversion metrics. But reach is the thing that stops you repeatedly preaching to the same choir.

In our norms, the highest ROI for reach still sits around 50–75% of the total audience - there’s a tipping point where it becomes less efficient, but the peak is still firmly in that middle band.

You don’t need to reach everyone. But you do need sufficient scale for memory to compound, particularly in a world where broadcast reach no longer happens by default.

Here’s the real punchline: “diminishing returns” is rare and often misread

Once you accept that you likely need more continuity, more reach, and more frequency than the old heuristics suggest, the immediate fear is: “Are we already spending too much?”

As noted earlier, only 1.3% of brands in Australia and New Zealand are genuinely at diminishing returns. That context matters here, because it reframes the anxiety - most advertisers aren’t pushing too far; they’re still operating below their potential ceiling.

But there’s a more important nuance hiding behind the headline. Digital video is often still the strongest ROI performer in the channel set, which means even when its ROI declines, it can remain the best contributor to total campaign ROI.

Paul highlights the commercial nuance clearly:

“We’ve seen scenarios where YouTube ROI could decline by 42% and still remain the strongest performer in the mix. It could halve and still outperform linear TV. So reacting to a softening curve without comparing alternatives can reduce total campaign ROI.”

This is the moment where many teams make the wrong call. They see a channel’s ROI falling and assume spend should be capped. But if the channel is still outperforming the alternatives, reducing it can lower overall ROI.

This is the move from channel-level optimisation to mix-level optimisation. And it’s where senior marketers earn their keep because it requires judgement, not dashboards.

Efficiency vs Effectiveness: The CTV Confusion

There’s a debate that keeps surfacing in video planning — and it usually goes something like this: YouTube is the efficiency play, BVOD is the effectiveness play. The logic sounds reasonable. BVOD delivers stronger impact per exposure, so surely it must be driving more growth? Not quite. And the math is worth understanding, because this distinction costs brands real money.

A stronger result per ad does not automatically mean a stronger overall outcome. If you are working with a fixed budget, the question is not which ad performs better in isolation. The question is: which option generates the most total sales for the money you have.

That is what ROI measures. ROI tells you how much additional return you get for every dollar spent. So the higher the ROI, the more total sales you generate from the same budget. This is where the confusion between efficiency and effectiveness breaks down. Higher efficiency does not mean lower volume. It means more output for the same cost.

So if YouTube delivers higher ROI than BVOD or other CTV options, allocating more budget to YouTube is not just an efficiency play. It is the decision that drives the most total growth.

The mistake is thinking you can improve ROI by spending less. Yes, the average may improve. But if you are measuring incremental impact properly, total sales fall as well. You have not improved performance. You have reduced it. ROI is not about making the numbers look better. It is about getting the most out of the budget you have.

This is what we see in practice. YouTube ads on CTV deliver higher response than any other device — and higher ROI than Linear TV (which sits at 39% of YouTube’s ROI) and higher than BVOD and SVOD (at 76%). Critically, YouTube is also scalable, so that higher return can be deployed across a larger share of budget.

Even where BVOD delivers strong impact per exposure, YouTube’s combination of higher ROI and scale makes it the stronger driver of total growth. So the next time someone frames this as efficiency versus effectiveness — push back. The real question is always: which option grows the business most, with the budget you actually have?

The bigger opportunity isn’t reallocation but unlocking more value inside the channel

If your ROI curve is bending, you don’t always need to substitute the channel. Often you need to change how you’re using it e.g. format, sequencing, creative fit, and goal alignment. Two examples from recent YouTube performance analysis illustrate the point:

1. Skippable is more efficient for maintenance campaigns, but for launch campaigns (new campaigns) non-skippable lifts 9% higher than skippable.

2. Vertical video is not just a “nice to test” anymore. Across the client base, Shorts is averaging +19% higher ROI and 55% higher response than any other vertical video and the fun (and slightly annoying) part? Creative is rarely optimised for Shorts right now, which suggests the performance ceiling may not be anywhere close to being reached.

What this means for CMOs

If you’re leading marketing across APAC or Australia right now, you’re balancing tighter budgets, fragmented screens and increased scrutiny. In that environment, simplistic rules feel safe: cap when ROI dips, flatten frequency, rotate budget but the more commercially accurate approach is this:

• Treat diminishing returns as a portfolio question, not a panic signal.

• Ask whether a channel still outperforms alternatives, even if its ROI has softened.

• Optimise formats, sequencing and exposure levels before reallocating spend.

• Recognise that continuity and scale are structural growth drivers, not “nice to have” extras.

Or, as Paul puts it:

“Do not automatically cap spend when a channel shows declining ROI. Instead, evaluate whether that channel still outperforms alternatives and contributes positively to overall campaign ROI.”

The real risk isn’t that you push too far into diminishing returns. The real risk is that you retreat too early and shrink the very engine that was driving growth, which is a far more expensive mistake.

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Unsure whether you’re actually hitting diminishing returns or pulling back too early? Meet our modellers and see how Marketing Mix Modelling helps you optimise video investment across the full mix, not just one channel curve.

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So the real question is not what this says about us. It is what it signals about where marketing measurement is heading.

Marketing measurement is no longer about reporting performance. It is about shaping commercial decisions.

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The measurement reset

We are in the middle of a reset.

For the past decade, marketing measurement has skewed heavily towards what is fast and visible. Performance metrics. Click-through rates. Cost per acquisition. Attribution models that generously reward the last touchpoint.

But something has shifted.

CMOs are seeing performance plateaus. Media costs are rising. Privacy changes have eroded signal. And short-term optimisation is no longer delivering sustainable growth.

At the same time, finance teams are asking sharper questions. Not about impressions, but about enterprise value. Not about channel efficiency, but about incremental growth.

The Forrester Wave recognition reflects this inflection point . It signals that the market is rewarding partners who go beyond channel reporting and connect marketing to total business performance.

From Marketing Mix Modelling to commercial intelligence

Marketing Mix Modelling remains the backbone of serious measurement. In APAC especially, where many organisations are still strengthening their causal foundations, MMM is not legacy. It is mission-critical.

Done properly, it provides what no dashboard or attribution model can: a rigorous, econometric view of what is truly driving growth. It quantifies incrementality. It clarifies the balance between brand and performance. It gives marketing credibility in the boardroom.

That alone makes it indispensable.

But for leading organisations, MMM is also the starting point, not the finish line.

The brands outperforming in volatile markets are those that build on MMM to:

• Connect marketing impact to total commercial performance

• Integrate controllable and non-controllable drivers such as pricing and distribution

• Align marketing and finance on shared definitions of ROI and value

• Use forward-looking simulations, not just retrospective diagnostics

• Protect brand investment while optimising short-term returns

In other words, they treat MMM not as a periodic study, but as the engine inside a broader commercial intelligence capability.

MMM tells you what drove growth.

Commercial Intelligence ensures you act on it, consistently and at scale.

That progression from marketing analytics to enterprise decisioning is central to why leadership in this category matters.

AI can accelerate insight. But it cannot compensate for weak fundamentals.

The AI reality check

There is no escaping the AI conversation. Nor should we.

AI and machine learning are powerful tools. But they are amplifiers, not foundations. If the data is fragmented, if KPIs are misaligned, if brand impact is ignored, AI will simply optimise the wrong things faster.

Forrester’s evaluation makes clear that governance, rigour and scalability matter as much as innovation .

In APAC’s fast-moving markets, that discipline is not optional. It is protective.

The brand multiplier effect

One of the most consistent findings from our ROI Genome research is that brand is not a “nice to have”. It is a multiplier.

Brands that rebalance from a performance-only strategy to a mixed brand and performance approach see dramatic improvements in revenue ROI. Conversely, those that over-index on performance alone risk eroding returns over time.

This is not theory. It shows up in the numbers.

Performance tactics convert demand. Brand investment creates it. The most effective organisations operate at both paces simultaneously.

And this is particularly relevant in APAC, where growth expectations are high but competition is fierce. Short-termism is seductive. But sustainable advantage is built over time.

The brands that win are not the fastest at chasing the next metric. They are the most disciplined at building systems that compound.

Beyond marketing

There is another uncomfortable truth measurement must address.

Marketing typically drives between 10% and 50% of business performance, depending on category and context. The rest comes from pricing, distribution, operations, macroeconomic factors and competitive dynamics.

If measurement ignores these drivers, marketing becomes an easy scapegoat when performance dips.

If measurement incorporates them, marketing becomes a strategic partner in enterprise decisioning.

That broader commercial lens is increasingly what defines leadership in measurement.

What this means for CMOs

Rather than asking who sits in the Leader quadrant, the more useful questions are:

• Does our measurement framework reflect the full commercial picture?

• Are we balancing brand and performance effectively?

• Is finance aligned on definitions of ROI and success?

• Are we simulating future scenarios, or simply explaining the past?

• Do we trust our measurement enough to defend investment when budgets tighten?

Recognition in The Forrester Wave™ 2026 is encouraging, but its real value lies in what it represents: a shift towards disciplined, integrated, commercially grounded marketing measurement.

Because ultimately, leadership in measurement is not about models. It is about giving CMOs the confidence to lead.

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I had an idea and assumptions, but I only knew what the numbers told me and (whisper it 🤫), the numbers lie - not maliciously but because the entire system of measurement is broken. And unless you’re living and breathing marketing measurement every day (which you’re not because you’re too busy surviving), you’re probably making the same mistake I did! So, here’s what I do differently now…

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The hidden truth about marketing leadership

Let’s be honest. As CMOs, Heads of Marketing, VPs and Directors we’re mostly just trying to keep the lights on and every year, the job gets harder:

• New platforms, new formats, new tools.

• AI copy generators. AI media planners. AI attribution (whatever that ends up being).

• Tighter budgets, bigger expectations.

• More hats! Creative lead, content producer, tech stack architect, media negotiator, HR therapist.

We know our teams are stretched. We know the strategy is running on assumptions, but we don’t have the bandwidth to fix it. That’s the part no one says out loud, most of us are just keeping our heads above water.

We’re reacting, not rewiring. We’re optimising the wrong things. We’re presenting clean dashboards to the board while quietly praying no one asks the one question we can’t answer: “What actually drove that result?”

The UPS chatbot and the business case that almost broke me

Let me give you a real example. At UPS, I pushed through a transformation project to build a LINE chatbot for customer service across Japan, Thailand and Taiwan. I knew it would reduce call volumes, improve CX, and modernise the brand experience. But it took a full year to build the business case across multiple markets, languages, and stakeholder layers, and another year to implement. Two years for one project but it was worth it. It became a best-in-class case study. The APAC team is still expanding it today.

However, while the business case was built on customer service, the quiet win was in brand. Across large parts of Asia social platforms aren’t just entertainment they’re service. Being present there forced us into relevance in a way paid media never could, which was great but here’s the truth - that was just one win. For every big bet I fought for, there were five others I quietly buried (sorry team). Not because they weren’t important but because I didn’t have the energy, political capital, or clarity to take them on and, too often, I couldn’t prove they were worth the fight.

The great paid search illusion (and why I clung to it)

You want another confession? Back then, I used to walk into budget reviews with beautiful paid search numbers. The ROI looked clean. The graphs went up and to the right. Everyone nodded. But I knew, deep down, that paid search wasn’t doing it alone. Other channels were seeding demand; brand work, influencer engagement, offline touchpoints, all of it was lifting search. But the data I had couldn’t connect those dots or only some of them. So, I led with the metric that would keep my budget safe.

Now, 12 months into my role at Analytic Partners, the leaders in Marketing Mix Modelling, I’ve seen the truth with clarity I never had before. Those “clean” numbers were a false comfort. I was building strategies on sand.

The 2026 measurement panic

Fast-forward to today, and here’s the part that genuinely keeps me up at night - we’re running modern marketing on broken metrics and lots of leaders don’t even realise it yet.

Let’s take attribution, which is still, somehow, being built on clicks. But in a world of AI-curated feeds, social discovery, and automated journeys with no click path, what happens when that last-click data disappears?

Social search is climbing fast, especially across Asia. On platforms like Xiaohongshu, TikTok, LINE, or Kakao, where content is social-first not web-based, visibility is rising. But those views? That “engagement”? It’s rarely tied to an outcome. And certainly not in a way your current reporting can trace. At the same time, brand contribution is finally getting the attention it deserves. But here’s the twist - we’re still trying to measure brand the way we did in 2012, with outdated reach curves, blunt awareness surveys, and black-box “brand uplift” reports. Let me summarise:

• Our attribution models are built on behaviours that no longer happen.

• Our paid channels are being propped up by organic influence we can’t see.

• Our social engagement has no line of sight to conversion.

• And our brand ROI is still based on recall, not revenue.

Feeling confident? If you’re not urgently challenging your agency, your insights lead, or your in-house analyst right now, you might be building your marketing plan on a fantasy.

The questions we should be asking, now

If you’re a marketing leader, I urge you to ask your team these questions as soon as possible:

1. What role did each channel actually play in this campaign?Did it drive awareness, action, preference, or conversion? Or did it just exist? Can you tell?

2. Did we hit a budget ceiling or is our message decaying?Because decaying creative often looks like declining performance… but so does market fatigue, poor sequencing, or misaligned targeting. If you don’t know which it is, how do you fix it?

3. Are performance drops due to saturation or lack of signal?This is a common one. Saturation means you’ve maxed out your addressable audience. Signal decay means your media is no longer working the way it used to (think platform algorithm changes, format fatigue). Very different problems. Very different solutions.

4. What could marketing have reasonably influenced, given the macro environment?This isn’t an excuse - it’s context. If interest rates spiked, prices surged, or competitor promos flooded the market… and your only lever was to “optimise creative” or “tweak bids” - was that ever going to work?

5. Do we, as a leadership team, actually understand what’s behind the numbers we’re signing off on?

If the answer to any of these is “I think so,” “not sure,” or “let me check” – that’s a problem. And not a tactical problem, a strategic one.

The uncomfortable leadership gap

Here’s another dirty little secret - a lot of us came up through creative, brand, or comms and we haven’t touched raw measurement in years. Now, we’re approving models, interrogating dashboards and defending effectiveness to finance teams based on data we don’t fully understand.

The pace of change in measurement is faster than most marketers can keep up with so ask yourself; do you actually know what’s behind the numbers your teams or agencies are presenting or are you nodding along, trusting the format, and praying it holds up?

What I know now and wish I knew then

Effectiveness isn’t just about proving ROI, it’s about proving what ROI was realistically achievable. It’s not about click-through rates or ROAS either. It’s about understanding the context, which means:

• The economy.

• Supply constraints.

• Competitor pricing.

• Platform throttling.

• Operational limits.

Efficiency is what you control i.e. execution, optimisation, pacing, creative.Effectiveness is the outcome and whether it could have been different.

Where real leverage lives

In my opinion, the most powerful thing you can do as a marketing leader right now is stop trying to optimise broken signals and, instead, ask better questions like:

• Is this a creative problem or a distribution one?

• Have we exhausted demand or just capped reach?

• Was this ever the right channel to begin with?

Remember, most marketing doesn’t fail because the work is bad. It fails because we misread what we we’re looking at and if you’re not absolutely sure what you’re looking at then it’s past time your found out.

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Let’s start with the numbers. According to Jun Cao, Vice President Asia for Analytic Partners, across most FMCG categories in China it is common to see marketing-spend-to-sales ratios run higher than most other markets. Jun adds, “in fact they can get as high as 45% in China whilst in the US a similar sector will typically run less than 10%.” That’s not a rounding error, it’s a different reality.

For global CMOs used to trimming media budgets in pursuit of efficiency, this ratio looks unsustainable. But in China, it’s the cost of entry. Cut spend, and growth evaporates almost instantly.

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Growth follows the money

Analytic Partners’ ROI Genome® data shows that marketing drives between 25% and 75% of e-commerce sales in China, depending on the platform and category. On impulse-driven platforms such as Douyin, that figure can reach a staggering 85%.

In other words, stop investing in marketing and you don’t just slow down - you stall. Brands that pause paid activity see sales collapse almost overnight.

That’s because, unlike in many Western markets, China’s e-commerce ecosystem is powered almost entirely by paid visibility. There’s no “organic” discovery at scale. Whether it’s search, social commerce, or live stream shopping, your reach and ranking depend on how much you pay to play.

The platform paradox

So yes, China is expensive, but not for the reasons most think. The real story is how e-commerce platforms have engineered a pay-to-play environment that forces continuous reinvestment.

Globally, less than 30% of FMCG sales happen online. In China, the figure sits between 30% and 50%, and in some categories, it climbs beyond 70%. That digital dominance makes marketing spend unavoidable: the platforms control the shelf space, the search results, and the attention economy.

But here’s the catch, much of this spend doesn’t pay back. According to Analytic Partners, 80% of brands in China are overspending on performance media. Channels like Douyin’s Qianchuan may drive traffic and transactions, but they’re often barely break-even once costs are tallied.

When performance eats profit

The arms race for visibility creates a familiar trap. As e-commerce grows, performance media spend scales up to sustain it. But because that spend is so short-term in impact - and so dependent on continuous reinvestment - profitability erodes.

Many marketers have found themselves in a paradoxical situation: spend more to sustain sales, but make less with each incremental yuan. The result is a “hamster wheel economy” where brand teams are running faster just to stay in place.

Towards balance

There’s a shift underway, though. Smart marketers in China are starting to rebalance brand and performance. They’re recognising that, in a market this saturated, sustainable growth requires more than tactical spending.

The emerging trend is a holistic measurement approach, one that integrates brand and performance media to optimise for both short-term sales and long-term brand health. Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) is making a comeback, as CMOs seek to prove which activities truly drive incremental growth, and which merely chase their own tails.

The CMO takeaway

For APAC marketers, China’s pay-to-play dynamics are a preview of what’s coming everywhere. As digital platforms tighten control over visibility, the line between “media investment” and “sales tax” blurs.

The lesson is not to spend less, but to spend smarter. Understand where marketing is genuinely driving incremental sales versus where it’s simply sustaining share of voice. Use data, and tools like MMM, to resist the gravitational pull of performance-only strategies.

Because in China, as in many fast-growth markets, marketing spend and growth are inseparable. But only the marketers who measure effectively will turn that spend from a cost of entry into a competitive advantage.

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This is where most of the anxiety around AI search actually sits. Not in disappearing clicks, but in the systems marketers have relied on to explain performance.

AI is not breaking search first. It is breaking the shortcuts we have relied on to explain it.

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The assumption search has always benefited from…

For years, search has occupied a privileged position in the marketing mix. Not because it always created the most value, but because it was the easiest place to see outcomes.

Search sits close to conversion. Attribution models reward proximity. Dashboards fill up with clicks, cost-per-acquisition and conversion rates. Budgets follow what looks provable.

Over time, this created a comfortable assumption: if search numbers were strong, marketing must be working. Low-intent and high-intent queries were bundled together. Generic exploration and brand-led intent were credited equally. Volume became a proxy for effectiveness.

That assumption only held because search absorbed a large amount of low-intent discovery. AI is now removing that layer.

AI didn’t create the attribution problem. It removed the padding.

AI-driven search experiences disproportionately filter out low-intent behaviour. Informational queries are answered directly. Exploratory research happens earlier, elsewhere. Fewer users need to click through to move forward.

What remains is a smaller, more concentrated set of higher-intent searches.

From a reporting perspective, this is destabilising. Clicks decline. Volumes soften. The numbers that once propped up performance narratives are no longer there.

What AI removes is not value, but the comfort of easy explanations. AI didn’t invent this flaw. It exposed it.

What this looks like inside real marketing teams

This shift is not theoretical. It shows up in the day-to-day reality of managing search as Debra Soon, CMO at Singlife, explains:

“Google search is not dead yet, but it is definitely diminishing. We have to continually fight, adjust and tweak our search strategies daily to stay on top, using different tools and partners. For instance, we have already deployed Generative Engine Optimisation. We can’t just pay an agency and leave it – just like anything else in the media, marketing and consumer experience today. Stay on trend!”

What matters here is not the word “diminishing”, it’s the effort. Search is being worked harder because it is being asked to stand in for something bigger: a coherent explanation of growth. As AI removes low-intent volume, that burden becomes harder to carry.

AI doesn’t shorten journeys. It makes them harder to attribute.

One of the more misleading narratives in the AI conversation is that customer journeys are becoming shorter or more compressed. In reality, they are becoming more fragmented and more category-dependent.

AI is now used early as a discovery and research tool, mid-journey to validate options, and late alongside search to support final decisions. Some categories involve weeks of consideration and multiple returns to search. Others move from query to checkout in minutes.

The length of the journey hasn’t changed but the distribution of influence across it has. Unfortunately, attribution systems still look for a single moment to credit whereas AI spreads influence across many such moments.

Why attribution breaks in an AI-shaped journey

Attribution still has value, but mainly within individual channels. It is useful for optimising bids, creative and targeting inside search or paid social.

What it cannot do is explain how channels work together, how brand activity increases the effectiveness of search, or how upstream discovery changes downstream efficiency. Platforms are simply not built to capture those interactions.

As AI removes low-intent noise and search volumes fall, those limitations become much harder to ignore.

Why search looks weaker in an AI world

When low-intent discovery disappears, search stops functioning as a convenient justification for growth. What shows up in search increasingly reflects the strength of upstream marketing activity, not the independent power of the channel itself.

This is why search appears to weaken in an AI-shaped environment. Not because it has stopped working, but because it has stopped carrying volume it never truly owned.

Search is no longer inflating the story. It is revealing it.

Why Marketing Mix Modelling matters here

This is where Marketing Mix Modelling earns its relevance.MMM shows how brand, media and discovery activity increase the value of search, rather than crediting search for demand it did not create. It allows marketers to separate demand creation from demand capture at a moment when that distinction has become commercially important.

The risk is not that search delivers less value. The risk is continuing to read search performance as a standalone growth story when the system around it has changed.

Search has always been strongest when it reflects effective marketing elsewhere. AI is simply forcing that truth into the open.

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For more than two decades, Google Search has been the backbone of digital marketing. If you wanted demand, you waited for someone to type a query. Budgets followed that logic, and search was rewarded for being closest to the moment of conversion.

Today, that logic is being tested.

The more useful question for CMOs is not whether search is declining, but which search is declining.

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Why “search is declining” feels true

There are good reasons this moment feels unsettling. Three shifts are happening at once, and together they distort how marketers interpret what we’re seeing.

First, discovery is moving upstream. People are increasingly encountering brands, products and recommendations before they ever open a search box. Social platforms and content feeds are doing more of the early work — shaping preferences and narrowing choices ahead of any explicit query.

Search still happens. It just arrives later, carrying more bias and clearer intent.

Second, AI is changing the search experience itself. AI-powered answers reduce the need to click through to websites, particularly for informational and exploratory queries. Users often get what they need without leaving the results page.

The behaviour hasn’t disappeared. The visible click has.

Third, paid search efficiency is under pressure. Rising competition, automation and broader match types have pushed costs up while incremental returns flatten. Analytic Partners ROI Genome data shows paid search ROI declining over time in many categories as budgets scale.

Taken together, these shifts make it easy to conclude that search itself is losing relevance.

But that conclusion skips an important step.

To understand what’s really happening, you have to look at where discovery now lives — and how that activity feeds back into search.

Where discovery actually happens now

If people are not starting with Google, where are they starting? The answer isn’t a single replacement for search, but a set of environments that increasingly create demand upstream and shape the searches that happen later.

1. Social and creator‑led discovery

Platforms like TikTok, YouTube and Instagram have become engines of inspiration, recommendation and informal research. On TikTok alone, 57 percent of users use the platform’s search functionality, and 23 percent search for something within 30 seconds of opening the app.

In Southeast Asia, this effect is amplified. Social video now accounts for around 20 percent of e‑commerce GMV in the region, up from less than 5 percent in 2022, according to Google, Temasek and Bain. Much of that growth is driven by creator content that blends entertainment, recommendation and transaction.

Melissa Laurie, Founder and CEO of Oysterly Media, explains:

“Feed Engine Optimisation (FEO) is emerging as the new way brands stop the scroll and create demand inside feeds, not Google Search results. How often has something caught your eye while scrolling that you were not actively looking for? An engaging short‑form video can spark awareness and become the trigger for a purchase. FEO focuses on creating videos that stop the scroll and drive action. It competes with Google Search by influencing decisions before intent even exists, turning passive scrolling into active demand.”

Crucially, that demand doesn’t disappear. It often reappears later as branded search.

Social doesn’t replace search. It loads the dice in advance.

2. Retail and marketplace search

Search is also migrating closer to the point of purchase. Amazon, Shopee, Lazada and TikTok Shop are now some of the most commercially valuable search environments in APAC.

In these spaces, intent is explicit and conversion rates are high. The risk is that brands treat retail media as a performance‑only line item, optimised in isolation. That repeats the same mistakes seen in paid search, where short‑term metrics crowd out long‑term brand effects.

3. AI‑assisted answers and earned visibility

AI tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude are also becoming part of the discovery journey. People are getting used to answers, not links.

Mid‑way through 2025, PR platform Muck Rack published new research, What Is AI Reading?, analysing over one million links cited by AI tools. The findings were telling:

• 95% of AI citations come from non‑paid media

• 89% come from earned media

• 49% of citations for recent queries originate from journalistic content

Brands that are visible, credible and well represented across the ecosystem are more likely to surface everywhere, including in search.

As Greg Heilers, Co‑Captain at Jolly SEO, notes:

“We see brands increasing their share of voice by engaging in long‑tail content across the Internet, from Reddit to directory sites to niche industry publications. Most importantly, now is the time to take your brand reputation seriously, trading in old, quick hacks, for real brand marketing.”

Visibility is no longer just about ranking. It’s about being present wherever decisions are being shaped.

As Kristopher Casey, Head of SEO at Resolution Digital, puts it:

“Search isn’t dying, it’s fragmenting. As AI and zero-click experiences grow, brands that win will be those with strong authority, recognisable signals and content designed to influence decisions before the click ever happens.”

What all of this reveals about search

When you step back, a clear pattern emerges.

For years, search was doing two very different jobs at the same time:

• Low-intent discovery — generic, exploratory, easily substituted

• High-intent decision-making — branded, shortlisted, commercially meaningful

AI and platform shifts are now separating those roles.

Low-intent discovery is being answered, absorbed or redirected upstream — into feeds, creators, marketplaces and AI interfaces.

What remains in search is higher-intent behaviour. Fewer clicks, but stronger signals. Less volume, more meaning.

AI isn’t killing search. It’s filtering it.

AI-driven search experiences disproportionately reduce low-value clicks — the kind that were never strong drivers of incremental growth in the first place.

What remains are clicks that convert better, retain longer and are harder for competitors to intercept.

In effect, AI is doing what marketers have always claimed to want:
removing noise and leaving signal behind.

Search is no longer the billboard on the highway. It’s the turn-by-turn instruction once you already know where you’re going.

Not all search clicks are equal

Treating all search clicks as equal has always been a measurement shortcut. It is now a strategic liability.

Low-value search is generic, price-led and easily substituted.
High-value search is branded, category-qualified and reflects everything that happened before the query.

The mistake marketers make is assuming search creates demand.
In reality, search mostly reveals it.

When discovery moves upstream and AI removes low-intent noise, what remains is search as a signal of effective marketing — not a substitute for it.

Search isn’t dying. It’s becoming honest.

In Part 2, we explore why AI-driven search will break attribution before it breaks search — and why that matters more than clicks ever did.

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The real advantage does not come from picking the ‘best’ channel. It comes from how channels work best together. That is channel synergy, and it is one of the most powerful, and most misunderstood, levers available to modern CMOs.

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What we really mean by channel synergy

Channel synergy is not about presence everywhere for the sake of it. Nor is it about simply adding more channels to a media plan. True synergy happens when activity in one channel amplifies the impact of another, lifting total effectiveness beyond what each channel could deliver on its own.

In practical terms, synergy shows up when:

• Brand activity makes performance channels convert more efficiently

• Upper‑funnel channels extend the impact window of lower‑funnel activity

• Offline media triggers search, social and ecommerce behaviours

• Consistent creative ideas reinforce memory across multiple touchpoints

When this happens, the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

Why synergy matters more in APAC markets

While the principles of synergy are universal, they are particularly important in Singapore, Australia and Malaysia.

1. Consumers are highly connected and highly sceptical

Singapore and Australia consistently rank among the most digitally mature markets in the world. Malaysia is not far behind, with rapid growth in ecommerce, social commerce and video‑led platforms. Consumers move fluidly between channels, often within minutes, and they are adept at filtering out noise.

A single‑channel approach simply does not map to how people actually make decisions. Synergy does, because it reflects the messy, non‑linear reality of modern buying behaviour.

2. Performance channels are under pressure

Across all three markets, CMOs are feeling the squeeze of rising costs, signal loss and diminishing returns in lower‑funnel channels. Search and paid social remain critical, but they are increasingly efficient only when supported by brand‑building activity elsewhere.

This is where synergy earns its keep. Stronger brand presence improves response rates, lowers acquisition costs and extends the shelf life of performance activity.

3. Media fragmentation is the norm

From BVOD and connected TV in Australia, to out‑of‑home and transit media in Singapore, to social‑first video and marketplaces in Malaysia, attention is spread thin. Synergy is what reconnects these fragments into a coherent growth engine, so each exposure reinforces the next.

The compounding effect of brand and performance

One of the biggest myths in marketing is that brand and performance operate on different timelines. In reality, they operate on the same timeline, just with different decay curves.

A recent APAC-focused report from our partners WARC, The Pace Principle, frames this as operating at two speeds at once. A sprint pace, driven by performance activity that secures short-term wins, and a long-distance pace, driven by brand-building that sustains growth over time.

The mistake is treating these as alternatives, rather than complementary modes that must be managed together because brand activity does not only work ‘in the long term’. It also boosts short‑term response by:

• ⬆️ Increasing mental availability at the point of choice

• ⬆️ Improving the effectiveness of calls‑to‑action

• ⬇️ Reducing reliance on discounts and promotions

Equally, performance activity does not exist in isolation. Without brand support, it tends to hit a ceiling faster and decay more quickly.

Synergy is what unlocks the multiplier effect between the two.

Where synergy shows up in real campaigns

While the specific channel mix will differ by market and category, successful synergistic programmes often share common patterns:

1. Offline that fuels online

In Singapore and Australia, TV, BVOD and out‑of‑home consistently act as powerful triggers for search and digital engagement. The strongest results are seen when these channels are planned together, not measured in silos.

2. Video as the connective tissue

Video, whether delivered through broadcast, streaming or social platforms, often plays a central role in synergy. It builds memory, emotion and scale, while feeding more efficient downstream performance.

3. Creative consistency across touchpoints

Synergy is not just about media. It is about ideas. When the same distinctive assets and messages show up across channels, each exposure works harder. This is especially important in fast‑scroll, mobile‑first environments like Malaysia and Singapore.

Measuring synergy without falling into the attribution trap

One of the reasons synergy is under‑invested in is measurement. Last‑touch and platform‑centric attribution models systematically undervalue channels that do not sit closest to conversion.

To understand synergy properly, CMOs need to:

• 👀 Look beyond immediate clicks and conversions

• 📏 Measure combined channel effects, not just individual ROI

• 💹 Account for delayed and indirect impact

• ⚗️Use methods that can see across online and offline

But too often, we stop at measuring 1–2 channels in isolation — typically paid search and social — while ignoring the full ecosystem.

We don’t often evaluate how different combinations behave at different stages of the campaign. For example, a product launch might demand TV + digital (+ OOH, if budgets allow) to front-load awareness. But what if you can’t sustain TV over time? Can OOH and digital take over the load? And what ratio of spend makes sense as commercial goals evolve? These are the kinds of planning decisions synergy thinking makes possible — but only if you’re set up to see them.

And that requires measurement systems that reflect how advertising actually works — across time, across touchpoints, and across combinations.

💡ROI Genome studies show that campaigns planned with coordinated channel roles — rather than channel-by-channel — can drive up to 35% higher ROI.

This is less about finding the perfect model and more about adopting a holistic measurement mindset.

What CMOs in APAC should do next

If you are operating in Singapore, Australia or Malaysia, and growth feels harder than it should, the answer is unlikely to be ‘optimise harder’ in one channel. It is more likely to be ‘connect the dots’ across channels.

Three practical steps:

1. Plan channels together, not sequentially

2. Invest in ideas that travel well across media

3. Measure success at the system level, not the channel level

Channel synergy is not a nice‑to‑have. In today’s fragmented, performance‑obsessed landscape, it is one of the few remaining sources of sustainable advantage.

And for CMOs willing to embrace it, it tends to reward them twice: with better short‑term results AND stronger long‑term growth.

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Because 2026 won’t be defined by new tools. It will be defined by old metrics finally breaking under new pressure. And nowhere will that be more exposed than in how we measure effectiveness — and how we design for decision-making.

The story we’ve told ourselves — that marketing can be optimised by the same signals that justified it — is cracking. Fast.

Prediction 1 - AI Won’t Fix Measurement. It’ll Break the Illusion.

Let’s be clear: AI is not here to clean up your data mess. It’s here to make the flaws undeniable.

In 2026, as AI continues to power zero-click journeys, answer-led search, and automated shortlisting, the volume of measurable clicks — the currency of most attribution models — will fall. Meanwhile, AI-powered dashboards will optimise faster against increasingly partial signals.

We’ll be wrong faster but with more confidence.

This is the moment where marketing stops being a creative function with a reporting problem, and becomes a commercial function with a credibility problem.

CMOs won’t be the ones demanding better analytics — CFOs will. And they’ll ask a simple question: Why are we still using metrics that don’t reflect how demand is actually created?

In APAC, where platform complexity and walled gardens have already strained the system, this reckoning will arrive faster — and hit harder.

Prediction 2 - Designing for Two Decision-Makers: Human vs System

Marketers love talking about customer journeys. But in 2026, that journey has officially split in two.

There’s the system journey i.e. the logic layer. The filters, rankings, ratings, algorithms, and recommendation engines that decide whether your brand even makes the shortlist.

Then there’s the human journey i.e. the feeling layer. The stories, trust signals, leadership voices, and cultural cues that decide whether someone believes your brand belongs in their life.

In Asia, this split has been growing for years. Platforms compress discovery, decision, and loyalty into closed ecosystems. AI will only amplify this, surfacing products based on operational logic, not emotional resonance.

Which means the brands that win in 2026 will treat operational reliability — price, delivery, service — as marketing inputs, not just logistics. And they’ll invest in visibility that doesn’t look like an ad: executive voices, founder content, product walkthroughs, and unpolished expertise.

Real marketing will show up in the system. But brand will be built in the human layer.

The CMO Challenge for 2026: Rethink What You Justified Last Year

If Part 1 was about holding your nerve on brand and resisting the reset reflex, Part 2 is about pulling apart your assumptions.

Not just your media plan. Your measurement logic. Your decision architecture. Your idea of how — and where — growth is created.

2026 will be a year of uncomfortable clarity. The good news? That’s where real strategy starts.

So what now?

1. Fix the feedback loop — Start here. If your data doesn’t connect across brand, channel, creative, and commercial impact, you’re not optimising — you’re guessing. In a world where AI amplifies bad signals faster, clarity is your competitive edge.

2. Build for both journeys — Design with intent. The system journey needs operational strength — price, logistics, service, availability. The human journey needs emotional depth — story, trust, visibility.

3. Diagnose the gap between logic and emotion — Your data should do more than measure performance. It should reveal whether you’re winning the system (search, delivery, ratings) and whether you’re resonating with humans (story, salience, trust). Map both. Then act like both matter.

Because in 2026, the brands that grow won’t just show up where the budget says they should — they’ll show up where the decision actually happens.

In the system. In the story. In the signals that build belief.

And if your measurement can’t see that? It’s not strategy. It’s theatre.

These aren’t hygiene moves. They’re competitive strategy.

Because in 2026, the brands that win won’t be the most innovative. They’ll be the most commercially coherent.

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And if you are trying to get those marketing fundamentals in place, that is where we can help.

Analytic Partners has never believed measurement is a dashboard. If you want to strengthen your measurement foundations, or simply sense-check what you have today, my team and I are always happy to have that conversation. After all, good measurement is not the finish line. It is where better decisions begin.

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But the real damage wasn’t AI slop. It was the reflex. We swapped campaigns before they compounded. We chased algorithm changes like they were strategy. We said “be agile” but looked more panicked than disciplined.

2026 demands a reset. Not of technology - of nerve.

The marketers who win won’t be the ones chasing platform signals. They’ll be the ones who build systems that compound and have the discipline to let them work.

Prediction 1 - Paul’s Hope for 2026: Brand Investment That Holds Its Nerve

Economic pressure hasn’t gone away. If anything, it’s intensified. Which is why Paul Sinkinson, our MD for Asia and Australia, is choosing hope — hope that marketers will resist the urge to go all-in on short-term tactics and instead hold the line on brand.

“TV used to carry that long-term brand memory load,” he notes. “Now we need to rediscover what that looks like across OOH, radio, and social — with creative that runs longer, not just louder.”

Paul’s challenge is clear: don’t let performance pressures shrink your strategy. Brand investment isn’t a luxury when times are tough. It’s the multiplier that makes your other spend work harder.

Prediction 2 - Influencers Work: When You Stop Treating Them Like One-Offs

There’s a disconnect in how marketers approach influencer budgets. “We’re paying influencers with media money, but we’re not treating them like media,” Paul explains. And it shows. Brands get strong awareness metrics but weak brand recall.

The fix? Treat influencer content as an integrated part of your campaign architecture. The most effective executions aren’t just logo up front — they’re product placements embedded in raw, authentic content that runs over time.

When influencer creative is planned with the same discipline as media — repeated, refreshed, and recognisable — it builds real memory, not just reach.

Prediction 3 - The APAC Signal: Consistency Isn’t Playing It Safe. It’s Playing to Win.

Here’s a myth that needs killing: that changing campaigns frequently is a sign of agility.

In reality, most marketers are reacting to platform fatigue, not audience fatigue. When reach drops or engagement dips, the campaign gets pulled. But often, it’s the algorithm that’s tired — not the idea.

This leads to wasted resets. New messages replace ones that were just starting to land. Brand equity gets wiped before it can build.

In 2026, the smartest marketers will stay the course. They’ll know the difference between message wear-out and distribution drop-off. They’ll build big, durable ideas that flex across formats — without losing their core.

Because consistency isn’t laziness. It’s strategy. And in APAC, it’s becoming a competitive advantage.

Prediction 4 - Jun’s China Outlook: Value and Focus in a Fragmented Market

Nowhere is that competitive edge clearer than in China — a market often described as the future, but now acting more like a mirror for what’s coming next across the region.

Jun Cao, Analytic Partners’ VP for China, sees a strategic reset underway:

“We’re moving from traffic-chasing to value-building.” And that value isn’t just price — it’s emotional resonance, brand trust, and functional excellence.

Two shifts are driving this evolution:

• Value over volume: Consumers expect emotional and rational value — not one or the other.

• Focus over fragmentation: Winning brands will dominate a few core platforms, not dilute across dozens.

In a media ecosystem twice as complex as other markets, China is proving that precision beats presence — and that scale only works if it’s anchored in strategy.

What to Watch For in Part 2

Before you log off for the holidays, here’s your final 2025 marketing resolution: stop mistaking movement for momentum.

And when you’re back — inbox full, budget under review, performance pressure kicking in — we’ll be ready with Part 2.

We’ll unpack:

• Why AI won’t fix marketing measurement — it will expose how broken it already is

• And why brands must design for two decision-makers: the human who feels, and the system that filters

Until then, enjoy the Christmas campaigns that were briefed in September and approved in panic! 🎄

See you in January. It’s going to be a fun year to be brave.

Share

And if you are trying to get those marketing fundamentals in place, that is where we can help.

Analytic Partners has never believed measurement is a dashboard. If you want to strengthen your measurement foundations, or simply sense-check what you have today, my team and I are always happy to have that conversation. After all, good measurement is not the finish line. It is where better decisions begin.

Let's talk 💬