The season of nonstop shopping festivals is almost here, starting with the 9/9 Super Shopping Day and continuing on every palindromic date up to 12/12. With so many eyes locked on e-commerce apps, it’s the perfect opportunity for brands to make an impression while the desire to spend is high.
What makes this year different is that it’s the first shopping season since AI has become deeply integrated into media targeting and execution.
Audience planning and activation is the ideal use case for AI. A discipline that once required rigorous manual analysis, testing, and tweaking is now being rapidly automated and optimised.
Today’s models can ingest enormous volumes of data from consumer buying preferences, ecommerce platforms, brand websites, and retail media networks, combining those signals to build rich, targetable audience profiles. But automation is just part of the story.
What really sets AI apart is its ability to “learn”, making it perfectly suited to the APAC region, where trends move quickly and the path from exposure to conversion is non-linear.
What really sets AI apart is its ability to “learn”, making it perfectly suited to the APAC region, where trends move quickly and the path from exposure to conversion is non-linear. Modelled audience profiles update as consumers engage, transact, or change their behaviour, giving advertisers the real-time insights they need to tailor messaging to specific segments during peak shopping moments.
On top of that, AI can translate data from multiple sources, from clicks and impressions to transactions and surveys into a unified structure. No matter where the data comes from, AI is able to weave it into a coherent view of the audience, a critical capability in APAC where data availability and collection methods can vary dramatically from one market to the next.
AI gives cross-border brands a ground-level perspective
Unlike comparatively homogenous markets like the US, where brands, platforms, media, and language reach from coast to coast, APAC is a loosely connected region made up of distinct countries and cultures, each with its own media ecosystems.
Fragmentation in APAC turns what might be a straightforward media plan elsewhere into a complex, multilingual puzzle, one that AI can help solve.
In Southeast Asia alone, media consumption varies dramatically. The apps that dominate in the Philippines differ from those in Malaysia or Singapore. This fragmentation turns what might be a straightforward media plan elsewhere into a complex, multilingual puzzle, one that AI can help solve.
Mobile-first behaviours add another layer of complexity. Across most of Southeast Asia, India, and China, smartphones provided the first exposure to the internet, bypassing the use of desktops.
This digital journey shaped how platforms were built and the ecosystems that emerged from them, where superapps, online-to-offline services, and frictionless ecommerce are the norm.
The broad strokes of the mobile-first ecosystem might be similar across much of APAC, but strategy can’t simply be ported from one country to the next. Though many platforms have an international presence, others are purely local.
Even basic elements, such as how text overlays are coded into images, vary, affecting everything from creative production to content localisation. AI plays a crucial role in navigating this complexity by enabling scalable, efficient adaptation of content and strategies to suit local market behaviours.
The golden rule still applies: Quality in, quality out
Every AI model is only as good as the data it’s fed, making first-party data a top priority. Brands should be doubling down on collecting a wide range of consented data points – from CRM inputs to app usage behaviour and loyalty program insights. By having a solid basis of first-party data, brands gain durable audience insights that do not live at the mercy of platform changes or regulatory crackdowns.
To take this data to the next level, it needs to be enriched. Again, data of clear provenance that sits independently of platforms or ID solutions is most reliable. Brands can go direct to their audiences with zero-party data; insights shared directly by consumers through surveys or partner with other brands or media organisations to engage with respectfully collected audience data.
Brands should be doubling down on collecting a wide range of consented data points – from CRM inputs to app usage behaviour and loyalty program insights.
Such deliberate and purposeful data strategy gives AI models a clean data diet while allowing brands to adhere to their privacy commitments (another detail that changes from one country to the next). This also reflects the reality that, unlike the US, where a core handful of alternate ID solutions are gaining traction, APAC’s fragmentation has prevented any one solution from achieving region-wide scale. Here, typical ID-based targeting doesn’t provide a scalable alternative.
As APAC prepares for its big ecommerce push, we’ll be seeing first-hand how brands that integrate AI into their audience workflows will gain ground in both mindshare and sales, and expand beyond the borders they typically operate in.
With the right data, smart models, and trusted partners, brands will discover that AI leads to very real growth.
Rishi is Managing Director for APAC at Ogury.
