Blogs & News

AI is becoming embedded in every marketing strategy: from behavior analysis and communications planning to content creation. But when AI models are “fed” with historical data while human behavior is shifting week by week, a dangerous gap emerges: brands increasingly believe they understand their customers—when in reality, they are only understanding the past. The year 2026 opens with many unknown unknowns: variables marketers don’t know they don’t know, yet ones that directly determine how brands survive and grow. AI doesn’t make marketers less intelligent; it makes them more confident in their misunderstandings. And that is the real risk.

Mega Sales 10.10, 11.11, 12.12 have become the biggest shopping festivals in Southeast Asia. Millions of consumers wait to hunt for deals, and businesses face a choice: chase short-term promotions or turn these moments into opportunities to assert brand identity. From a Brand Creativity perspective, we believe Mega Sales is not just a race for revenue, but a moment that tests a brand’s ability to create long-term value.

Southeast Asia’s OTT market has entered a stage of selective growth. Accedo’s Winning in the Southeast Asian OTT Market report reveals a massive landscape with seventy-one billion minutes of premium video watched annually, a revenue growth rate of fourteen percent, and a continued rise in mobile-first content consumption. This is not simply evidence of a market expanding; it is evidence of users changing — and as users change, the role of OTT brands must evolve with them. The shift is driven by three major forces: the transition toward mobile-first viewing and AVOD models, the growing fragmentation of the OTT ecosystem accompanied by the expanding dominance of telecom operators, and the rapid rise of local content and live streaming. These forces do more than reshape products or business models; they redefine what an OTT brand represents in the minds of users.

Throughout the history of leading global brands, one rule keeps repeating: brands do not collapse because they lose market share, but because they lose their strategic role within the organization. When a brand is reduced to a communication function—rather than a strategic lens that shapes how a company understands the world, operates internally, and creates value—crisis becomes only a matter of time. Classic failures such as Kodak, Blockbuster, Nokia, and Uber offer us deeper perspectives on the true role of branding and the alignment between brand positioning and business strategy.

In modern communication - where every brand has only a few seconds to shape its image in the public’s mind—“good content” is no longer the deciding factor. What matters more is whether the content is rooted in the brand’s identity, whether it is resilient enough to endure across campaigns, and whether it enables the public to understand – think – feel correctly about the brand. Viettel High Tech’s A80 campaign is a prime example of how all Brand Content only becomes valuable when it is built from the brand’s core. It is this foundation that created the campaign’s powerful impact: more than 83 million impressions and a discussion volume 16 times the original target.