The Silent Death of Brand Budgets: Understanding the Trends in APAC Marketing

Brand budgets hardly die off abruptly. They die silently, one quarter at a time when nobody in the room can justify that they are working. WARC put data behind this "trend". Its new "Twin Pace Effectiveness Gap" study surveyed 375 senior markets and agency leaders across nine Asian markets in India, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Philippines, Australia and New Zealand. 

• Nearly 9 in 10 agree a consistent, recognizable brand drives sustainable growth.

• However, only 47% say actual campaigns reflect this belief.

• Only 23% of marketing work is judged on both short and long term results.

• Fewer than 1 in 10 campaigns get checked six months later.

• Over a third of the brands say short term pressure is the reason brand building keeps losing.

• More than half of the agencies indicated that clients default to quick activation every time.

eMarketer's 2026 forecast also shows that Asia-pacific ad spend growth is among the slowest in the world, with money flowing towards whatever is easier to measure fast such as retail media, social and short video. In this situation, brand investment loses the budget with the evaluation window has not reach far enough to prove that it is working. 

Innovation: This is what brand should be built from

Most leadership teams get stuck when the conversation hovers around two considerations (i) run a price promotion or  (ii) run a brand campaign. True value creation is often omitted and hence innovation is not even considered, which is the essential ingredient that makes brand building real.

 A promotion campaign gets the attention for a week, with customers showing up for the discounts and leave or switch when it ends. A brand campaign attempts to build and buy a feeling of trust, recognition and loyalty. The feeling, when it has not much behind it, does not last, which is one key reason why brand spend is hard to justify in a budget review. There is hard to prove that it adds to the performance metric, which "typically" weights largely to  "revenue" or "cost savings". Sounds familiar?

Innovation is what gives the brand campaign something valuable and true to say. Like a refill system, a smaller pack size that meets the need of a price-sensitive market, a service model no one offers. These are the reason a customer keep choosing a brand after the discount ends and the advertisement stops running. The innovation creates the repeat purchase one can measure in weeks and it is the element that makes the brand credible over the years.

Here's two examples we recognize. First, Southeast Asia's 11.11 and 12.12 e-commerce mega sale days: brands pour their marketing budget into one day, train their customers to wait for it and the discounts buys do not value-add for the other 364 days. Second, the sachet economy that FMCG companies built decades ago selling into Philippines and Indonesia. When a full-size bottle of shampoo was too expensive against a daily wage, the answer was not a permanent discount. It was a smaller format that made the same product affordable without cheapening it. Same underlying problem - affordability but solved in two completely different ways. Only one of them still works next year.

What this means for commercial and marketing leaders in APAC

This is a governance problem before it is a marketing one. It is also an important area that you would need agreement with your CEO. Short-termism is not a mindset you can fix easily with a beautified brand deck. It is baked into how budgets get approved and how success gets defined and agreed at the beginning.

If you evaluation window spans within a quarter, the organization will optimize for the quarter, regardless of what the marketing principles says. The solution is not choosing brand over performance, it is making sure what you fund as "brand" is truly taken as a strategic lever, is real and valuable, not just media budget, acting like a supporting platform for promotional or short-term goals.

Audit your biggest brand or innovation investment this quarter. Ask two questions: does it create value a competitor cannot copy overnight and does the KPI framework attached to it include a 6, 12 month checkpoint, or does it quietly default back to campaign metrics once the quarter closes?

 If the answer to either is no, don't wait for a bigger budget to fix it. Start with the smallest version of innovation you can deliver this quarter. A better unboxing, a loyalty perk people actually use, a smaller pack size for a price-sensitive segment. Something a customer notices and adopts within weeks. Fast adoption on something small is what earns you the case for the bigger, longer bet next quarter. Proof beats conviction, every time.

WARC -"WARC study finds structural barriers limiting marketing effectiveness across APAC" (covering WARC's "The 'Twin Pace' Effectiveness Gap" report, survey of 375 senior marketers/agency leaders across 9 APAC markets) **https://www.adobomagazine.com/insight/warc-study-finds-structural-barriers-limiting-marketing-effectiveness-across-apac/

eMarketer - "Asia-Pacific Ad Spending Forecast 2026: Retail Media and CTV Present Opportunities Amid Global Headwinds" **https://www.emarketer.com/content/asia-pacific-ad-spending-forecast-2026