By Mark Tungate What’s the magic formula that makes Thai advertising so entertaining? One of its greatest practitioners shares his thoughts with us. Everybody who loves creativity has a soft spot for Thai advertising. It’s funny, surreal, occasionally dramatic and nearly always over-the-top. It looks like nothing else. So it
Influencer marketing spend is growing, but scrutiny is intensifying: 68% of brands struggle to measure ROI from creator campaigns, while 72% of consumers distrust paid influencer content. Traditional approaches that prioritise follower count over credibility and accountability are no longer enough. With budgets under pressure and CMOs demanding proof, not
By India Fizer Every new year promises transformation. With AI now embedded in nearly every workflow and platform, 2026 marks a turning point: not in what we use, but how we choose to compete. In conversation with AdForum, agency leaders reveal what they believe will truly move the industry forward,
There have been times I imagine waking up in a world where nothing is trying to sell you anything. No billboards lining highways. No sponsored posts slipping between photos of friends. No pre-roll videos before the content you actually want. No jingles, no brand mascots, no carefully engineered desire. At
Somewhere in Yiwu, China, the world’s most industrious factory town, a seamstress stitched a smile upside down. And, she accidentally created the most honest brand mascot of the Year of the Horse. Meet the crying horse: red, plush, vaguely miserable, and inexplicably sold out. It wasn’t conceived in a brainstorm.
Ensemble, the full-fledged creative agency under Omnicom Media Malaysia, has unveiled ‘Project Lift-fluencers’ with OCBC, a six-part social series featuring stories of revitalisation and the shared success of Malaysians who uplift their communities. The campaign forms part of OCBC’s mission of #SamaSamaBangkit (a motivational phrase meaning “Let’s Rise Together”), focusing
Marketers have always loved a shortcut. Focus groups instead of full launches. A/B tests instead of boardroom opinions. Dashboards instead of “I feel it will work”. Now a new shortcut is entering the room, and it sounds almost too good to be true. Synthetic marketing. It means using synthetic data
If 2025 felt like a year of holding your breath, 2026 is shaping up as the year people finally exhale without pretending everything is fine. According to VML’s Future 100: 2026 report, we are entering an era defined by “dystoptimism”: a cultural mindset that acknowledges systemic breakdowns, social anxiety, and
A new regional study by Sun Life Malaysia suggests that the idea of stopping work entirely is no longer realistic—or even desirable. According to its Retirement Reimagined: Asia’s Retirement Divide survey, 64 per cent of Malaysians expect to work past retirement age. Nearly two-thirds say they are doing so because
There is a particular kind of honesty that only nature affords. Trees don’t posture. They don’t chase relevance. They don’t refresh their look every few years because a trend deck says so. They grow, quietly, patiently — and when they work, they work for decades. Which makes it quietly fitting
