You’ll probably see my short bio somewhere above, but just to help you decide whether you can trust me, let me share a few words about myself. Just a few, pinky promise.
I’m Hung, and I’ve been in marketing for about 12 years now. I currently lead more than 20 product lines in payments, managing millions of monthly active users, launching gamification projects, and working very closely with the Vietnamese market.
Okay, enough about me. You’ve seen the “Top 10 Trends of 2022, 2023, 2024” lists that came and went before anyone remembered them. Now it’s 2025, and yes, the game has totally changed in Asia. This one comes from real work across Asia and what I’ve actually seen play out in the market.
So here’s my take: First-party data and superapp infrastructure are going to be the foundation of how marketing evolves in Asia.
And why care about Asia? You know TikTok, right? Of course you do. Where’s it from? Exactly. Fasten your seatbelts, we’re heading to Vietnam. I’ll walk you through what’s happening there and in other emerging markets, why superapps are genuinely fantastic, and why their ad spend is super good.
Vietnam is one of the most mobile-first markets in the world. People here basically skipped the desktop era and went straight to smartphones. Shopping, payments, entertainment — everything happens on mobile. That shift shapes some very unique consumer behavior that global brands can learn a lot from.
One of the biggest things I’ve noticed is the rise of the superapp. Vietnamese consumers love the idea of having everything in one place: payments, shopping, entertainment, even financial services. Take MoMo, for example. People don’t just use it to pay bills. They also book movie tickets, donate to charity, buy insurance, and join all kinds of interactive campaigns.
And yeah, for advertisers, that means campaigns no longer live in silos. You can design full journeys where awareness, engagement, purchase, and retention all happen inside one app.
More and more brands want platforms that bring everything together, including targeting, engagement, and measurement, instead of running campaigns across several tools that don’t communicate with each other.
When everything exists in one place, you can finally see the complete customer journey rather than a messy mix of disconnected signals. That is what makes superapps and integrated ecosystems so powerful.
In Vietnam, “cookie-less” isn’t a crisis. People here tend to see it more as an opportunity than a threat. Why? Because Vietnam is so mobile-first. Creativity is built into how marketers collect and use data. If cookies disappear, you just find another way to connect the dots.
I’ve seen small brands gamify data collection beautifully. Instead of asking users for info directly, they turn it into a quiz or interactive swipe — something that feels more like a game than a form. Users end up sharing both transactional data, like purchase behavior, and emotional or interest-based data, such as what they like, explore, and engage with. So cookie-less or not, the data still flows. It’s just wrapped in a little fun.
You mention you want new sneakers, and next thing you know, a social app quietly suggests the perfect pair. Creepy? Maybe a bit. Useful? Definitely. That’s the paradox we live in, and somehow, it works.
If you run ads on a single-purpose platform, like a music or payment app, you only know one side of the user — what they listen to or how they pay.
Superapps, on the other hand, know everything. The user’s lifestyle, habits, spending patterns, even emotional touchpoints. That means better segmentation, smarter targeting, and way stronger ROAS. With that depth of insight, your targeting becomes sharper, your segmentation more accurate, and your return on ad spend significantly higher.
If you look at Vietnam or Southeast Asia more broadly, people don’t just use one app for a single purpose. They live inside complex superapps.
They pay bills, book travel, buy groceries, and even donate to charity all in one place.
That creates a constant flow of first-party data. The more diverse the app’s features, the more complete the picture you get of a customer’s lifestyle — not only what they buy, but how they behave, what they like, and how they make decisions.
User acquisition is actually the easy part. Retention, on the other hand, is the hardest. Not only because user behavior keeps changing, but because competition is everywhere.
The superapps that succeed are the ones that start with a very specific, high-frequency service such as payments or mobility.
If you look at most case studies, they all began with something people do every day and kept it deeply integrated into their lifestyle — like paying bills or topping up mobile balances.
After winning the payments category, they carefully added new services over time.
But if you expand too fast without anchoring users, they churn, and you lose them just as quickly as you gained them.
Yes, the fruit. During one of our campaigns at MoMo, we tried something very simple. We gave users digital vouchers for fresh kiwi fruit. They claimed the voucher in the app and then went to a store to pick up real fruit.
It sounded small at first, but it worked better than we expected. People loved it because it turned a digital action into something real. It made them smile, and more importantly, it made them come back.
That moment showed me what real engagement looks like. When technology meets everyday life, even something as small as a kiwi can make people feel connected.