APAC’s Energy Shock Is Already Rewriting Your Marketing Plan
Energy caps, inflation rises and supply chain disruptions are coming, let's get ahead of them.
Amongst the many appalling outcomes of the current Middle East conflict we have to consider the fact that the economic fallout will impact Asia and Australia more so than most other regions. As marketers, we need to be honest with ourselves and our business leaders about what we can and can’t do to adapt our plans for the near future. This article is not at ‘hot take’, it is an attempt to grapple with grim realities of the moment we are all facing.
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.
Sinkinson says, “We’re already seeing early signals of this pressure. In some categories, just 12 weeks of stock disruption is enough to erase 1.5% of annual sales purely due to availability.”
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?”.
“The brands that win on price in an inflationary period are rarely the ones that simply held their ground, they’re the ones who understood relativity, which requires knowing your own elasticity curve, and watching your competitors’ curves in real time, says Sinkinson.”
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.
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.