Mid-2026 Check-In: How APAC Content Budgets Are Shifting
Halfway through 2026, the way APAC brands allocate content budgets has changed meaningfully. Here's what we're seeing across our client base.
Every year around the midpoint, we take stock of how our clients are actually spending — not what the industry reports claim, but what we observe across briefs, retainers, and project conversations. The picture in mid-2026 is clearer than it has been in years, and a few shifts stand out.
Volume Is Up, Per-Asset Cost Is Down
The single biggest trend: brands are producing significantly more content than they were 18 months ago, but spending roughly the same total budget. The efficiency gains from AI-assisted production — faster post, automated format adaptation, generative B-roll — have been passed through into higher output rather than lower spend. Brands aren't cutting budgets; they're getting more for them.
The Retainer Model Has Won
Project-by-project commissioning continues to decline in favour of monthly creative partnerships. The brands that switched to retainers in 2024 and 2025 are renewing, and new clients increasingly come to us asking for ongoing arrangements rather than one-off productions. The reason is structural: the content calendar never stops, and retainers eliminate the friction of constant re-briefing and re-quoting.
Hero Content Budgets Are Holding
Counterintuitively, even as per-asset costs fall, budgets for flagship hero content are holding steady or rising. As AI makes everyday content cheaper and more abundant, the hero film — the one piece that carries the emotional weight of a campaign — becomes more important as a differentiator, not less. Brands are concentrating their premium spend on fewer, bigger moments.
Localisation Spend Is Being Reallocated
AI dubbing and localisation tools have reduced the cost of adapting content across APAC's many languages. Rather than banking that saving, most brands are reinvesting it into producing more market-specific original content. The result is less one-size-fits-all regional content and more genuinely localised storytelling.
What This Means Going Forward
The brands positioned best for the second half of 2026 are the ones treating production as an always-on capability rather than a series of discrete projects. They've built efficient, AI-augmented pipelines for volume content and reserved their craft investment for the moments that matter most. The gap between these brands and those still commissioning project-by-project is widening — in both output and impact.