New Yandex Ads x YouGov “Clear Signals” report finds Thailand at the forefront of AI adoption as the marketing industry shifts toward more disciplined, performance-driven execution
Yandex Ads’ new report Clear Signals: Southeast Asia 2026 Digital Marketing Trends Report launches today based on a YouGov survey of marketers across Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia. The report finds that AI adoption in advertising is now widespread across Southeast Asia, with 77% of marketers either piloting or fully implementing AI solutions. Thailand leads the region with 84% adoption, ahead of Vietnam and Indonesia, highlighting its position at the forefront of AI-driven marketing transformation. Across the region, 66% of marketers say AI is already delivering high or very high business impact.
Yet adoption alone is no longer the defining factor. The report shows that execution readiness is becoming the real differentiator, with 79% of marketers citing cost, lack of tools or insufficient internal expertise as barriers to increasing marketing spend. At the same time, 80% now manage performance reporting in-house, increasing pressure on teams to demonstrate measurable outcomes before budgets unlock.
The report suggests that marketers are increasingly moving away from fragmented “tool-based” experimentation toward integrated AI-driven ecosystems capable of automating optimization, audience relevance, creative adaptation and measurement across channels.
As marketers face growing pressure to prove ROI, platforms powered by recommendation technologies and machine learning are becoming increasingly important for automating optimization, improving audience relevance, and scaling performance across channels.
Performance concentrates in fewer formats as experimentation slows
As pressure rises to prove results, marketers are consolidating budgets around a smaller group of proven formats. Thailand is comfortable maintaining presence across saturated and secondary ad formats like social media ads (63%) and video (55%), rather than retreating to a narrow mix. Confidence does not collapse beyond the top format: Influencer (48%), display (34%) and native (32%) are strong. This flatter distribution indicates greater tolerance for format diversification in competitive media environments.
Mobile remains the center of strategy but precision drives success
Mobile-first platforms continue to anchor media planning in Southeast Asia. 71% percent of marketers say social media ads on mobile platforms are their primary route to customers.
However, the report highlights growing execution friction. In short-form video, one of the most optimization-intensive mobile formats, lack of audience insight (28%) was identified as a key barrier to maximizing performance, limiting marketers’ ability to fully capitalize on the format’s potential.
Markets scale at different speeds depending on ROI confidence
While belief in AI’s impact is high across Southeast Asia, the pace at which markets move from pilot to scale varies significantly. The share of marketers citing difficulty measuring ROI ranges from Vietnam (41%), Thailand (23%), and Indonesia (14%).
These differences indicate that decision confidence rather than adoption levels alone is increasingly shaping how quickly budgets expand.
International growth rises, but cost and localization reshape execution
International expansion is firmly on the agenda for Southeast Asian advertisers. Whilst 66% of marketers continue to focus on APAC markets, interest in Europe/EMEA (47%) and CIS/Russian-speaking (22%) markets is steadily growing as businesses look beyond increasingly saturated domestic competition toward regions with strong consumer spending, lower acquisition pressure, and high long-term growth potential.
However, expansion is becoming more deliberate as marketers weigh execution risk alongside opportunity. The most frequently cited challenges when targeting international audiences include cost and budget constraints (46%), lack of actionable insights (38%), difficulty measuring ROI (35%) and localization complexity (35%).
Among advertisers targeting CIS/Russian-speaking markets, structural readiness plays a larger role. They are more likely to prioritize digitalization and omnichannel delivery (50% vs 36% overall) and localization (36% vs 24% overall), alongside stronger emphasis on first-party data (41% vs 31%) and personalization (39% vs 28%).
Neha Dawar, Business Development Manager at Yandex Ads Thailand, said: “What we’re seeing in Thailand is not just rapid AI adoption, but a highly platform-driven and mobile-first ecosystem, where digital platforms play a central role in how consumers discover and engage with content. This creates a strong foundation for AI to deliver impact, but only when it is paired with the right data, tools and executional capabilities.
As competition intensifies, Thai marketers need to move beyond experimentation and focus on building stronger audience understanding, integrating data across platforms, and applying AI in ways that directly improve performance outcomes. Yandex Ads’ AI-powered advertising platform enables businesses to enhance communication effectiveness and deliver tangible business results. To capitalize on this opportunity, businesses should prioritize unifying their data, investing in the right tools and capabilities, and adopting a more performance-driven approach to reach and engage new audiences effectively.”
Paruj Daorai, DAAT Committee, The Digital Advertising Association (Thailand) (DAAT) stated: “The Clear Signals report provides valuable insights for marketers, agencies, and professionals across the advertising industry. In today’s landscape, marketers must shift their role from tool users to strategic decision-makers to ensure they are not driven solely by technology. The report also highlights that AI is becoming a key intermediary connecting brands and consumers, enabling more efficient content creation and distribution. At the same time, consumers are increasingly using AI to filter and select content that aligns with their interests. As a result, the challenge today is not only about creating content, but about developing strategies that intelligently integrate technology, human understanding, and data to drive sustainable brand growth.”
Thienprasit Chaiyapatranun, President of the Thai Hotels Association (THA), said: “These regions are not fringe experiments. They represent deliberate expansion plays as demand patterns diversify and reliance on single-source markets declines. These markets matter in the current economic context. Slower growth and rising competition within core APAC routes are coinciding with structural shifts in global mobility patterns, whilst visa-free access has driven a surge in Russian speaking travelers. These audiences bring different expectations: longer planning cycles, heavier reliance on trust and service detail and stronger engagement with search, long-form video and messaging-led discovery rather than impulse-driven social feeds.”